Hello list, Hereby the Eulogy for mapbuilder as spoken at the opening of the Foss4G conference in Cape Town;
Hi, My name is Steven Ottens and I'm speaking on behalve of the mapbuilder steering committee. It is with sadness in our heart that we've announced that Mapbuilder is no more. It is today exactly 7 years ago that Cameron Shorter posted his first mail on the Mapbuilder mailinglist. He set apart his idea for a community mapbuilder which would provide a way to collaboratively build maps. Years later this idea would be proposed again in a different setting resulting in OpenStreetMap. It took a while for Camerons idea to turn into mapbuilder code. The intial idea was to create an applet and energy was put into the GeoTools project to support OGC standards. However applets became a thing of the past and Raj Singh created a prototype in a new technique that years later would become known as AJAX. It was already 2003 and during the christmas holidays the first implementation of Mapbuilder was created. Still it would be a few more months before the first release. Once the first release was out, more people got attracted to the project. The already strong support for open standards was increased by various people. Mike Adair wrote the support for WMS-timeseries. Pat Cappelaere wrote the first ever SVG based vector renderer for webgis. Olivier Terral created an SLD editor upon Pats work. Also Mike Adair and Richard Greenwood started the javascript projection library. Already we are moving into 2006. This year will go down in history as the beginning of the end of mapbuilder. A lot happened in 2006, it began early that year with the founding of OSGeo, which Mapbuilder joined as one of its founding projects. The power of OSGeo became clear during the summer of 2006. People from different projects got together to discuss project-transcending isues in foss4g land. The foss4g conference that year saw the birth of the tiling standard and the decission to use OpenLayers as /the/ render engine for webmapping clients. Andreas Hocevar took lead in stitching OpenLayers and mapbuilder together. With incredible support of the openlayers developercommunity there was a first release in less than six months. Mapbuilder had many features OpenLayers was lacking in those days. The mapbuilder developers contributed lots of code to the openlayers project to make sure that all that functionality would still work once openlayers became the backend. To fully merge all Mapbuilders functionality with OpenLayers took another year. Once that work was done it became clear that OpenLayers was attracting many Mapbuilder developers and users. We found it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between OpenLayers and Mapbuilder. The powerful XML based MVC design was at the same time its weakness. Over the years AJAX development had became mainstream and the developer tools favored pure javascript implementations like the one from OpenLayers. In that fateful conference in Lausanne we already spoke out our hope that one day we would merge into one open source webgis client. When we saw OpenLayers flourish under the OSGeo flag we decided that our time had come. We set out to create a client where you could access maps and add your own data to share with others. If you go to the openstreetmap site you will see openlayers as the client to access the maps and add your own data. In a sense we have reached our goal. In the meantime mapbuilder has touched many more people who are still active contributers to foss4g. It set a standard in standard complience and many of its ideas live on in different projects. So while we are sad to announce that we stop our active development of Mapbuilder, we see a bright future for the foss4g community. We hope that our example will help others to join their efforts where possible, creating a powerfull foss4g software stack. signed the project steering committee, Andreas Hocevar Cameron Shorter Gertjan van Oosten Linda Derezinski Matt Diez Mike Adair Olivier Terral Patrice Cappalaere Steven M. Ottens Vincent Heurteaux -- Steven M. Ottens -==- http://research.geodan.nl/planet ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ mapbuilder-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mapbuilder-devel
