Archive for July, 2010

Brave New World: OpenLayers 3.0

Posted in default on July 21st, 2010 at 00:56:48

OpenLayers is approaching the ‘Brave New World’ of a major API breakage for the first time since OpenLayers 2.0 in October of 2006.

Things that have changed in OpenLayers since then:

  • Support for vector drawing.
  • The existence of ‘spherical mercator’
  • reprojection of objects
  • More than a dozen new layer types
  • The existence of TileCache, FeatureServer, and RESTful HTTP APIs for geodata
  • A tile-serving service from OpenStreetMap (also, for OpenStreetMap: 4 major API changes)
  • Over four dozen additional contributors to the source code
  • Over 2000 trac tickets
  • 10 2.x releases

Overall, is it any shock that it’s time for a pretty major change?

In order to facilitate rapid development, we’ve shifted development of OpenLayers ‘3.0’ to github; you can follow along (or fork you own) on the OpenLayers github project. To be honest, git scares the crap out of me; every time I’ve used it, I have consistently lost data as a result of not understanding the tool and using the wrong command. However, I fully realize I am a fuddy duddy who needs to get over his problems at this point. 🙂

Looking forward to seeing the future of the world where OpenLayers is even more awesome than it already is!