[geojquery] FOSS4G Code Sprint Summary

[Volker Mische]

Hi all,

I should have sent this email earlier, but didn't find the time to. It
should get all the people to the same level of information that haven't
had the chance to attend to the FOSS4G code sprint.

After introducing ourselves (list of people that participated [1]), we
did some brain storming on how geojquery could look like. This also
included how jQuery-ish (or jQuery UI-ish for the widgets) we want to be.

The result was that the interaction with OpenLayers (what we call
"geojquery core") will use concepts of jQuery, but not be identical. So
people would need 2 paragraphs of documentation to understand the
concept, but then feel easy to use it. There is a map object (currently
called geoMap, so we don't clash with jQuery's .map()) that setups the
map and store information we might need for internal geojquery core use.
There is also a layer and a feature object. Those three elements (map,
layer, feature) need to be understood by the developer. It's still
blurry which function will return which kind of element, but in the end
it should be easy to use/understand and chainable (the question is e.g.
if a addLayer method should return the layer or the map object).

The other part are the widgets, we are calling "geojquery UI". These
will behave like jQuery UI widgets (and also use the jQuery UI widget
factory). They pollute the global namespace and return a jQuery object
so that you can do things like: $('#mtLegend').legend(options).hide().

More about the API with small examples is at the wiki [2].

We then decided to use the code I wrote back half a year ago for the
first version. We try to clone the functionality Anne has built for
EduGIS [3] (code is available at [4]).

A first prototype is already available in the main repository [5].

[1] http://gitorious.org/geojquery/pages/Foss4g2010
[2] http://gitorious.org/geojquery/pages/Api
[3] http://research.geodan.nl/mapwidget/
[4] http://gitorious.org/geojquery/annebs-vmx-geojquery-anne
[5] http://gitorious.org/geojquery/geojquery

Cheers,
  Volker