[OpenLayers-Users] OpenLayers 2.6 RC1

[Christopher Schmidt]

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the first release
candidate of OpenLayers 2.6.  As of 2.6-RC1, the OpenLayers 2.6 release
closes 282 outstanding tickets, 75% more than any OpenLayers release to
date. 

For information on possible changes that will need to be made between
this version of OpenLayers and previous versions, please look at the
Release notes, available at the Release Notes information[1].

We invite you to help us test the 2.6 release candidate! To test 2.6 in
your applications, include the following tag in your OpenLayers-powered
page:

  <script src="http://openlayers.org/api/2.6-rc1/OpenLayers.js"></script>

As always, the source is available at http://openlayers.org/download/.
Bug reports can be filed in Trac, under the 2.6 version and milestone.

This is a large release: the largest of any OpenLayers release to date.
We encourage widescale testing in an effort to shake out any bugs in
upgrading existing applications to OpenLayers 2.6. This release features
a number of major developments, including:
  
  * Integration of the CloudAmber "Google Like" popups for advanced
    visual display of information in popups
    * Resulting improvements throughout all popup code, including
      autosizing popups to the content they contain.
  * Improved panning of commercial layers like Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps
  * Animated panning of the map, using OpenLayers.Tween support
  * Layer Image transitions, for keeping images visible when zooming
    to allow smoother transitions
  * Client side reprojection support using built in transformations for
    spherical mercator, or the proj4js library for other projections.
    * Support for reprojecting vector data layers
    * Support for reprojecting user-facing controls like mouseposition
    * Support for programatically reprojecting points and geometries 
  * Improved OpenLayers Styling, including:
    * OpenLayers.Style, OpenLayers.StyleMap, OpenLayers.Rule support
      for improved feature-attribute based styling
    * SLD read/write support 
  * Support for reading and writing multiple versions of WMC.
  * Improved KML support, including KML styling support.
  * Improved GeoRSS Format support, including GeoRSS GML read support.
  * New ScaleLine Control for displaying visual scale
  * New NavigationHistory control for map history navigation
  * Localization/Better Internationalization support
  * Layer support for MapGuide Open Source 
  * A number of new / improved handlers to make handling user
    interactions easier
     * Handler.Hover
     * Handler.Click
     
There are a number of people who have really made this release happen.

TOPP and MetaCarta worked together to arrange for several day long 'hack
session' in TOPP's office in New York City with myself, Erik, and Tim
Schaub: This session was extremely productive, and ended up producing a
huge amount of code for the relatively little amount of time we were all
able to get together. Without that several day long session, I think
we'd still be far from a release. Many thanks to Chris Holmes from TOPP 
and John Frank/Josiah Strandberg at MetaCarta for supporting that effort. 

A list of people who stic out to me as having helped especially to make
this release happen:
 * Andreas Hocevar (TOPP)
 * Tim Schaub (TOPP)
 * Roald DeWit (LISAsoft)
 * Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS)
 * Erik Uzureau (MetaCarta)
 * Eric Lemoine (Camptocamp)
 * Pierre Giraud (Camptocamp)
 * Fred Junod (Camptocamp)
 * Paul Spencer (DM Solutions)
 * Mike Adair (DM Solutions)
 * All the other testers, commenters, etc.

This is by no means a complete list: There are dozens of people who I
have interacted with that deserve to be on this list, but these are the
ones who stick out in my mind as being a major boon to the current
release.

Additionally, I'd like to speak high praises about the users who helped
out during the hackathon during FOSS4G. Although it's hard to believe,
the FOSS4G hack session was during the current (2.6) release cycle, and
we picked up some really great additions to the library, like our new
Fancier examples list http://openlayers.org/dev/doc/examples.html  as a
result of the hard work put together in a single day by a bunch of
people who had never touched OpenLayers before. So thank you to those
people as well.

Further RC announcements will be sent only to the Developers list:
anyone interested in tracking the progress to a final release should
subscribe[2] to that list.

We look forward to your feedback on this release.

[1] http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.6/Notes#Changestoexistingapplicationsfrompreviousversions
[2] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta