[OpenLayers-Dev] Available ressources for participating in development of open layers

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

Christian Seewald wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Our company has decided to spend some resources on open source 
> development in open layers eg. by porting some of our additions in our 
> own app to the open layers framework main development.
> 

This sounds great!

>  
> 
> The app has been in production for several months by now 
> (http://www.pegelonline.wsv.de/gast/karte/standard) and we have 
> developed some additions to the open layers core. The main features 
> which extend or add to open layers functionality are the following:
> 

Looks nice.  I'm not a user of markers or popups, but it looks like you 
have done some good work with them.

> -          popups which both react to mouseover- and mouseclick-events

I like how this works.

> 
> -          a feature for selecting markers (click on the ‘Auswählen’ - 
> button (English select) at the popups) and acting upon the selection
> 
> -          a new theme for the open layers controls
> 

It would be great to have some alternative themes.  If the whole thing 
could be packaged up an set next to the theme/default, I think it would 
make a good addition (seems like we could host some additional themes 
somewhere).

> -          a filtering and selection mechanism for a list of markers 
> (open up the second + from the top at the right side)
> 
> -          another filtering mechanism which hides markers based on a 
> combination of marker attributes 
> (http://www.pegelonline.wsv.de/archiv/karte/standard), as the public 
> version of this map displays only to measuring stations, the filter is 
> not really useful, but you get the idea.
> 
> -          The data for each marker is based on ascii-data 
> (http://www.pegelonline.wsv.de/internal/karte/openlayers/pegelinfo) 
> which contains a lot of site specific additional data fields, besides 
> the default data attributes provided by the OpenLayers.Format.Text and 
> OpenLayers.Layer.Text classes. Maybe some abstracted version of adding 
> custom attributes could be developed

Have you considered a format like KML?  Perhaps interoperability is not 
a concern, but it would be cool to be able to at least show people your 
stuff on Google Earth/Maps (would need to be in Geographic/WGS84).

> 
> -          The size of the markers depends on the zoom level
> 

This can be accomplished with rule based styling if you are able to use 
vector features instead of markers.  I'm a bit biased, but I'd suggest 
trying to move toward using a vector layer over a marker layer in terms 
of future support & features.

>  
> 
> We would offer to refine some of these features, and work on further 
> abstraction and modularization in our ol svn sandbox.
> 

It would be nice to see some of these things wrapped up as patches on 
tickets.

In addition, there are a good number of tickets awaiting patches.  If 
you are able to dedicate some resources toward fixing issues that 
already exist, it is a good way to establish a relationship with other 
developers and eventually will aid in getting your other contributions 
incorporated.

>  
> 
> What we need is some guidance on what would be most useful and in what 
> way, so we can prioritize our efforts in those directions.
> 

If you haven't already, please read through the following page and the 
pages it links to:

http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/HowToContribute

If we don't have a CLA from you or your company (first glance didn't 
make me think so), it would be good to get a signed contributor license 
agreement.  The process is described on the page above.

After reading up on creating patches and filing tickets, I'd recommend 
taking a look at some of the existing tickets.  We're working toward a 
2.8 release.  Outstanding tickets can be found here:

http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.8

Looking at the patches on existing tickets marked for Review will give 
you a sense for what needs to be done.

Thanks for your contributions!

Tim

>  
> 
> If there are other more pressing issues we could also approach them.
> 
>  
> 
> Regards, Christian
> 
> 
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-- 
Tim Schaub
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.