[OpenLayers-Dev] Ordnance Survey OpenSpace using OpenLayers

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 10:26:09PM -0000, OpenSpace wrote:
> Hi OpenLayers Team 
> 
> Tomorrow Ordnance Survey (Britain's national mapping agency) is letting
> a group of developers preview a new mapping API named OS OpenSpace.  We
> aim to launch this to the public in January. We have used OpenLayers as
> a base for the API and have really enjoyed the opportunity to work with
> such a comprehensive library.  
> We just wanted to say thanks to all you guys for building such a
> fantastic library.

Hello OpenSpace Team,

We're glad to hear that you've found the library fantastic to work with,
and it's good to see that OpenLayers has, for the most part, filled the
requirements you have for it.

Some of the things that you developed are thigns we're working on
improving for our next release: for example, as of the past 48 hours,
the trunk of OpenLayers now has the ability to use custom
transformations to reproject data, and we're working on extending that
to apply to various formats and classes in the OpenLayers API. Hopefully
this will let OpenSpace and other activities like it move forward more
easily in the future.

We'd love to be able to make it easier to work with OpenLayers for you
in the future, so that you can have to maintain less of your own code,
and it would also be good to share experiences with some of the core
OpenLayers development team, so that we can share insights that might
not otherwise be obvious. Lack of documentation is the bane of so many
open source projects existence, and OpenLayers is no exception, despite
our best efforts. 

Based on the website, the service is now in closed alpha: I know that I
personally would be interested in being able to explore the API and see
what things we might be able to help with, and I think that other
developers would feel the same. Is there any likelihood of adding
OpenLayers developers to the alpha to help explore these possibilities, or 
is the plan to keep the current alpha closed as it is, and work hard on
moving towards a broader release in early next year?

In any case, thank you for the notice, and we look forward to seeing and
hearing more.

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
OpenLayers Developer