OpenLayers Report 2007

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OpenLayers

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
  • Contact name: Chris Schmidt and Erik Uzureau

Key Accomplishments

  • Graduated from OSGeo incubation
  • Three major releases in 2007
    • 2.3: Bugfix release 2.2, improvements in tile handling, added support for TMS
    • 2.4: Major release adding vector drawing support, improved event handling framework, many editing controls
    • 2.5: Support for more formats: KML, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, additional vectorization tools, better third party api integration, improved developer documentation
  • Many many new contributors: 250+ on developers list, 550+ on users list, over 110 users signed up for Trac accounts
  • Integration into existing toolkits: MapBuilder now uses OpenLayers for rendering, camptocamp MapFish library does the same
  • Many commercial deployments of OpenLayers

Areas for Improvement

  • Plan to migrate to OSGeo infratructure for SVN/Trac
  • Process to become a committer better defined (add more committers, add reviewer role, etc.)
  • Better documentation, better memory handling
  • Continue to expand support for existing Geo standards.

Opportunities to Help

  • Case Studies: Why are you using OpenLayers? What do you gain by using it over other tools?
  • Examples:
  • Documentation: Prose text describing how to perform a series of steps to achieve a goal in OpenLayers, to add to the existing developer documentation and examples
  • Improved interaction with current users of proprietary software to understand and target their needs, including (but not limited to): ** Possibly developing support for ESRI-specific map requests like ArcXML
    • Improved documentation on how to transition from proprietary software to OpenLayers

Outlook for 2008

In 2008, OpenLayers is poised to continue on its current trend of taking geographic information to the web. With support for new geographic formats and servers, improved performance, and web browsers becoming more and more commonly used as the sole client to access datasets, OpenLayers has placed itself in a strong growth position. Patches and contributions are arriving from around the globe, from contributors on 5 different continents.

In 2008, expect to see wider usage of OpenLayers as the project becomes more widely used and better documented. Already, we have seen major governmental organizations take up OpenLayers as the sole public API to their data, preferring the open source project to commercial ventures such as Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft's offerings. With this trend, it is likely that users can expect to see continued usage leading to wider support for different browsers, improved functionality, and more in 2008.

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