Hi, as most of you know, I am currently working on an overhaul of our GeoExplorer and Embed viewers. I was planning to finish it this week, but in the meantime I found out that there are more viewers now, in the GeoNode namespace. The changes I have made so far cause these viewers to break. Well, you realize how deep the rabbit hole goes while you're falling. To avoid any harm to the codebase that could cause headache for others (because I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks), I decided not to commit any refactored code until all loose ends are resolved. Instead, I give you an overview of the changes that you can expect in the first week after my vacation:
Every component/widget with a map will inherit from a new GeoNode.Viewer, the successor of our current GeoExplorer, and very similar to the new GeoExplorer of the OpenGeo Suite. It extends gxp.Viewer. The viewer gets its layer and map configuration from a new ConfigManager, which replaces the current BackgroundLayerManager and the code for saving configurations in the composer. The python side configuration of background layers does not really change, and the ConfigManager creates a config object for gxp.Viewer, with the whole map and layers configuration. With this refactoring, we finally start sharing the code base and bug fixes with the OpenGeo Suite. It also results in the removal of hundreds of lines of custom code, e.g. code that handles layer loading and the app init sequence. A side effect of this are several bugfixes, e.g. the Google Earth view shows the WMS layers again, using gxp's GoogleEarth viewer instead of our unmaintained one. That's it from me for now, I will be back at work on Jun 21. -Andreas.
