Mapbuilder 1.5rc1 was released just before Christmas and now we are defining our future direction, which is likely to include further integration with Openlayers possibly Mapfish. We welcome Openlayers and Mapfish developers to join mapbuilder-devel and contribute to our discussions.
Mapbuilder's latest notable improvements are: * Greater stability of the 1.5 thread. * Integration of Openlayers as the Mapbuilder rendering engine * A restructuring of projection code, now called Proj4js, and now usable by Openlayers. Thanks in particular go to Andreas who has been the powerhouse behind this release. Today's Mapbuilder team meeting focused on "What next?". Logs at: http://uwyn.com/drone/log/bevinbot/mapbuilder/20080107 In summary: * We pay tribute to the excellent work and developments in Openlayers and would like to continue to collaborate rather than compete with Openlayers. * In future Mapbuilder releases, we would like to provide value add to Openlayers in the areas that Openlayers is not addressing, rather than compete head to head on the standard generic web mapping features. * We note that OL folks have been discussing an Openlayers plugin concept. Mapbuilder may be able to fill this role and the migration path is less onerous now due to the last round of integration work. * Next steps are: 1. Identify the worthy areas of Mapbuilder which are not covered or not covered well by Openlayers and would be best covered by a project like Mapbuilder. (I hope OL folks can help us refine these). 2. Revise Mapbuilder priorities and design goals to reflect future direction. 3. Design 4. Prototype 5. Code 6. ... rest of development cycle Here are some ideas about what Mapbuilder is currently strong(er) at. Contributions/comments welcome. * XSLT processing. Mapbuilder allows widgets to be rendered using XSL to build HTML. * XSL chaining. Convert one XML document to another XML doc when the first changes. * Model/View/Controller design pattern. Multiple widgets can be driven from one model. Model doesn't need to know about the widget rendering its data. This leads to the concept of "Mapbuilder being a framework". OL supports this in the Map object and multiple controls. I'm not sure whether OL supports the concept for other models. Eg for a WMC document, or an OWS Context document. * Natively stores XML documents, which means that there is no loss of data in importing/exporting. This helps compatibility with OGC standards which currently are mainly XML based. * Mapbuilder is easily configurable via a config file. I''m aware of mixed feelings about the value of this. However it would be make it easy to create a drag-and-drop web page builder. -- Cameron Shorter Geospatial Systems Architect Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050 Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254 Think Globally, Fix Locally Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________ mapbuilder-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mapbuilder-devel
