Archive for the 'Cartoweb' Category

FOSS4G 2007: OpenLayers

Posted in Cartoweb, Locality and Space, OpenLayers on September 27th, 2007 at 05:05:40

OpenLayers talk bursting at the seams. Went well, though Tim rushed it at the end so there weren’t as many questions asked as I had hoped there would be. I’m thinking that the ordering process from votes wasn’t really informative enough for making room decisions — some of them seemed to be in the wrong space for the crowd, though of course you can’t tell that ahead of time. Perhaps this just means that people who voted were biased away from things like OpenLayers and FeatureServer relative to the majority of the population… but then again, TileCache went in the Big Hall, and that’s only really usable with OpenLayers as far as I know…

Anyway, we also had the pre-sprint BOF, where we talked through some ideas on what we want to hack. It seems like improved documentation is definitely on the list, as well as context and animated panning/zooming. We’ll see what gets done, but it’s exciting times.

Speaking of exciting times: Camptocamp’s Cartoweb got rave reviews from everyone I talked to. (And, What is it based on on the client side but OpenLayers?) It seems like a really new thing to most people: “Wait, I can do real GIS-y things in a browser? Why did no one tell me this before?”

I don’t know about everyone else, but I was hugely impressed by seeing OpenLayers doing things that looked to me like real work: attribute search, quantile based styling, etc. Things that every GIS application seems to have — and now you can get them for OpenLayers too. Cool stuff.