Slashgeo

The Chris GISMo blog tells us OpenLayers 2.0 has been released. From the press release: "OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License. This new release of OpenLayers supports a number of new layer types, including support for Virtual Earth, Google, and more, alongside WMS, WFS, KaMap, and GeoRSS." The official website.

Dave Bouwman not only discuss MapServer, but the installation process of OpenLayers and a WMS server. From the blog: "Again, this is not the least bit earth shattering, and it's a loooong way from a production application or an in-depth understanding, but the total time investment thus far (including this write up) has been a little over one hour. Thus, I think it's safe to say that the basic learning curve here is now in the realm of reasonable. Will your manager set this up? No. But this is no more complex (and may be simpler) than setting up ArcIMS or ArcGIS Server."

From the OSGeo announcement mailing list: "The OSGeo Board has approved the application by the GeoNetwork project, and the OpenLayers project to enter the incubation process, a stepping stone to becoming full fledged OSGeo projects. The OpenLayers project is a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in a web browser. The GeoNetwork project is a Java catalog application for standards compliant management of data and service metadata. GeoNetwork: http://www.geonetwork-opensource.org, OpenLayers: http://www.openlayers.org, OSGeo Incubation: http://incubator.osgeo.org " What is GeoNetwork? From the website: "GeoNetwork opensource is a Free and Open Source catalog application to manage spatially referenced resources. It provides powerful metadata editing and search functions as well as an embedded interactive web map viewer."

st_0x0ef writes "From openlayers.org : "After almost two weeks of work on OpenLayers, 2.5 featureset is finally starting to come together [...]

Some of the new features for OpenLayers 2.5:

• Better Vector Format Support, including GeoJSON in its current incarnation and better cross-browser XML parsing support.
• Better Feature Editing — with support for ‘virtual vertices’ a la Google My Maps for extending out a shape and keyboard support for removing vertices from it.
• Spherical Mercator support, to better support overlaying other data on top of commercial data sources. This means that vectors and TileCache over Google Maps baselayers will work.
• Regular Polygon drawing and creation: allowing users to specify a center, radius, and number of sides to create a polygon around an origin.

(Note that the above URLs are likely to change/go away as they move into trunk.)

Already in trunk for this release:

• Combination of gridded/untiled layers to limit code duplication
• NaturalDocs powered documentation: already up and running on the apidocs, this complete rewrite of OpenLayers documentation is a huge step forward.
• Debug support: In numerous places in the code, when a function can’t fail gracefully, it will now report to the user via the Firebug or Firebug Lite console when switched on.
• Rotating Vector Features
• Over 100 other bugfixes and minor changes to the OpenLayers code.

All in all, this release is going to bring together many of the small things that had been left over from the 2.4 release, and I’m looking forward to moving forward with many of the exciting new features."

All Points Blog offers an clear and to-the-point entry on the relationship between data and API licenses for webmapping apps, specifically Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! data into other webmapping apps such as OpenLayers. Meanwhile, The Earth is Square wonders if a workaround could revive a NASA World Wind plugin to access Google Maps data. From APB: "I had in my head that somehow OpenLayers was "doing something wrong" since it could pull in data sets from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MultiMap into its own interface (go play with that!). With quite a bit of patience Frank explained that OpenLayer is doing everything correctly. It has an API key for each of the API providers (if needed) and follows all the rules of the license. So, how is this different from the Gaia team noted above that got shut down? That group was accessing the data directly from Google servers and not, as stipulated in the license, via Google software. (Google Earth has no API like Google Maps does.) Frank even showed me the code where OpenLayers dutifully uses its API key to pull in tiles from Google Maps. Google, he noted, even contacted the MetaCarta team to ask if there was any thing needed to further their implementation!"

Mapperz discuss PdMarker, "a Javascript library that extends the Google Maps API, making it easier to customize marker behaviour". Amongst the features: "A. Standard browser tooltip, help cursor B. Click to show detail window C. No tooltip, click for detail window D. Click to change class & disable hiding E. Marker reposition on hover"

All Points Blog discuss the new service from MetaCarta to map web search results in the case of the petroleum industry. From the press release: "MetaCarta, Inc., the leading provider of geographic search solutions, today announced MetaCarta GeoIntel for Petroleum, an online geographic search service that provides a simple and cost-effective way to geographically search and discover Web-based energy-related intelligence. [...] GeoIntel for Petroleum is a vertical geographic search engine that searches 3,500+ Web sites and 9,000,000 unique Web pages containing information that is specific to the energy industry. The content is continually being reviewed by a "content curator" for relevancy."

Community Mapbuilder was never featured on Slashgeo and this status report on the OSGeo mailing list provide a great summary of what Mapbuilder is and where it's heading. From the post: " MapBuilder is a powerful, standards compliant and FREE geographic mapping client which runs in a web browser. It renders raster maps from WMS, Google Maps and more, and vector layers from WFS, GeoRSS and GML. It even offers feature editing to WFS-T. [...] Mapbuilder developers are now contributing to the OpenLayers codebase when adding core Mapping functionality. Merging code between projects is difficult emotionally as much as technically. The catalyst for the Mapbuilder/OpenLayers merge was that there were four different projects developing vector rendering using SVG/VML at the end of 2006. After much discussion we agreed to work together on the same code base." This webpage provides additional information on the strategic direction of Mapbuilder. Mapbuilder is an OSGeo project.

The OpenLayers mailing list announced the release of TileCache 1.4. From the announcement: "TileCache provides a Python-based WMS/TMS server, with pluggable caching mechanisms and rendering backends. In the simplest use case, TileCache requires only write access to a disk, the ability to run Python CGI scripts, and a WMS you want to be cached. With these resources, you can create your own local disk-based cache of any WMS server, and use the result in any WMS-C supporting client, like OpenLayers, or any TMS supporting client, like OpenLayers and worldKit." See also the OSGeo Tile Map Service specification.

The official OpenLayers blog informs us OpenLayers 2.5 has been released. From the blog: "As of this final release, the OpenLayers 2.5 release closes 190 outstanding tickets, more than any other OpenLayers release to date! [...] Now on to new features! SLD, client side reprojection, improved documentation and examples, tile transitions… so many neat things that 2.6 will hopefully bring." See this previous post on what's new in OpenLayers 2.5. The Earth is Square adds a post on OpenLayers working on the iPod Touch. See related stories below, OpenLayers has been covered regularly.