Slashgeo

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."