Slashgeo

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.

Anonymous Voxel writes "The open source webmapping server GeoServer 1.5.3 has been released. According to GeosServer Blog [...] This version represents the culmination of a ton of hard work to make GeoServer more compatible with the new formats gaining great popularity in the rapidly expanding geo world. Foremost among the improvements is a number of advances in our support for Google Earth. KML, the format understood by Google Earth, has been available from GeoServer for awhile. But our implementation wasn’t flexible enough to make good looking maps and to take advantage of the advanced features of the format. That has all changed, with better default styling, custom placemarks from templates, support for ‘Super-Overlays’ and Time, and automatic generation of legend information. There is also experimental support for referencing an existing cache of tiles to use in a Super-Overlay. The ability to style one’s 2d map and get the same output in Google Earth has also improved dramatically, as it now picks up proper scale elements." The rest of the announcement below.

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."

Late last December the Fuzzy Tolerance blog ran a nice demonstration of building a geoportal with open source software such as OpenLayers, TileCache, GeoServer, PostGIS, jQuery, REST and AJAX. Here's the resulting geospatial portal. From the blog: "From a developer’s perspective, the biggest advantages I’ve found with OpenLayers-Tilecache-jQuery-REST is speed and simplicity. The beta site went from an empty text file to release in only a few weeks of actual development time nestled in between other projects, with a lot of that taken up by a jQuery/OpenLayers/GeoServer/SLD learning curve, design, web service work, software setup, etc. It is also marvelously simple, being nothing more than Javascript and HTML. From an end-user perspective, you get a much more responsive application, a nicer map interface than I usually give people via OpenLayers, and everything is free and open source." I copied below some of the previous Slashgeo stories regarding the software used in the demonstration.