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!