Brave New World: OpenLayers 3.0
Posted in default on July 21st, 2010 at 00:56:48OpenLayers 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!