The Google Summer of Code season wraps up this week, so I'd like to brief everyone on the overall progress.
You will hear directly from each student in the next week on the details of their work in a post on mapnik.org/news, but I will offer my high level take here. We had three projects, one which will not be completed (at this time) and two which have approached near completion. 1. Windows build system This one unfortunately had to be put on hold because Roel had some important family issues to attend to. Roel had a very successful first half of the project and you can read about his project and thinking on his midterm post [1], but had to drop out for the second half. I know there is a big community of mapnik (and potential) mapnik users who were excited about this effort and the possibility of easy and frequent windows builds. Hopefully in the future we could consider funding, as a community, the completion of this project. 2. Carto CSS support in mapnik core Colin has written both a carto-generator (take existing mapnik xml and produce CSS), and a carto-parser (parse CSS directly into a mapnik Map without an intermediate XML step). The carto generator is to the point that it *almost* produces valid CSS for the osm.xml, which is incredible. His main efforts during the second half have been on the carto parser and supporting, evaluating, and implementing all the syntax which is supported. All the action for this project has been on github up to this point [2] but we have also created a milestone to start discussing what it will take to merge into trunk, and when [3]. 3. Advanced text placement and formatting Hermann has been working in a branch of mapnik, making an incredible set of improvements and even refactoring some of the most complex and narly bits of mapnik's placement code. He has recently added the ability to format text differently within an existing text string and has added support for his multiple placement fallbacks to the ShieldSymbolizer [4]. We also have a new milestone for thinking through getting this work into trunk [5]. Thanks to Google for supporting this amazing program this year and most of all to the students and mentors (Rob Coup and Artem Pavlenko) that worked so hard to make this an incredible summer. Dane [1] http://mapnik.org/news/2011/jul/17/gsoc_windows_build_system_halfway/ [2] https://github.com/rundel/carto-parser [3] http://trac.mapnik.org/milestone/GSOC%20Carto%20C%2B%2B [4] http://trac.mapnik.org/log/branches/textplacement [5] http://trac.mapnik.org/milestone/GSOC%20Text%20Placement _______________________________________________ Mapnik-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-users
