OpenLayers Hackathon
This week is going to be an OpenLayers HackFest here in the MetaCarta office in Cambridge. In addition to the normal developers here in the office — Schuyler and myself — we’ve got our errant hacker Erik Ezureau up from south of the border, and Tim Schaub, in town from the far west. (Of course, when you live on the East Coast, anything west of New York is supposed to be Far West).
The big goal as part of this development time is to integrate the work that has been done by a number of contributors to the Vector branch of OpenLayers. This development has been geared around creating in-browser vector-based display and editing, including display of WFS lines, polygons, points, etc. This is one of the main features which is holding OpenLayers behind other mapping APIs: adding this functionality using client-side rendering will definitely increase the number of applications which can be built on top of OpenLayers.
I’m looking forward to meeting Tim, who has been one of our most prolific contributors over the open development lifetime of the OpenLayers project. With contributions both technically and socially, Tim is one of the most important contributors to the project today, and having him together with the other three developers that we have sprints with in Cambridge can only amplify the quality and quantity of code coming out of this sprint.
Many thanks to MetaCarta for making this happen, and also to the developers of the vector branch, who have put so much hard work into making the idea of client-side feature rendering a possibility. Without the hard work of people like Cameron Shorter, Bertil Chapuis and Pierre Giraud and other developers from Camp To Camp, and the numerous contributors of both testing and commenting on the code and process, there is a lot of really solid work that doesn’t look like it will be particularly difficult to merge back into trunk. They’ve done an excellent job in making it this far, and this week we hope to carry the baton home, by bringing the code back to trunk with documentation, tests, and support.
I’m hoping to keep up blogging as we go through this sprint to keep the outside world appraised of what’s going on: I aim for as much transparency as possible. Hopefully we’ll be diligent enough to keep those of you who are interested informed.
– Christopher Schmidt, MetaCarta Labs OpenLayers Hacker