[OpenLayers-Dev] Vector Integration

[Cameron Shorter]

Erik,
Excellent to see this moving forward, and welcome to the vector branch 
team. :)

I stopped work on the vector  branch around Christmas when the OGC 
Testbed project that was funding me completed.

I assume Pierre and Bertil have extended the work further since then. 
But they can talk to that.

I think we can target this is two stages if we want to.
Stage 1: Vector rendering / GML parsing / preliminary WFS

Stage 2: Add in tools.
Bertil was doing some good work with editing tools.

At Christmas, this was the state of the code:

Stage 1:
* Vector rendering code worked without any bugs.
* GML passing works
* I think Pierre has a WFS layer working. Although this is a complicated 
issue to address if done properly. Issues like. Should you use tiling on 
WFS? What do you do about features that cross tiles? Do you try to 
minimize the features loaded. Etc.
* It could do with a solid code review and a few changes in certain 
places. (I remember noticing a few things like functions being in the 
wrong package), but generally is was pretty good.
* JSDocs were patchy in areas
* There were no unit tests
* There was no wiki documentation
* I'm not sure what the state of our UML design at the moment, but I 
suspect it should be updated. This was a useful method of communicating 
design, and would probably be worth maintaining for all of the 
OpenLayers codebase. (Although this may be out of scope, as there is a 
day or two involved in setting up a simple UML diagram for a project 
this size - unless you can find a JS->UML translator)

Stage 2:
* Bertil had a number of vector editing tools working.
* However we didn't have a decent concept of a toolbar. This should be 
addressed as part of stage 2. Of note, it ties in very closely with the 
Mapbuilder integration with OL because we need to link from the 
Mapbuilder tools to the OpenLayers tools, and this probably should be 
done through the toolbar. Olivier Terril is currently looking at this 
problem from the Mapbuilder end. Refer to 
http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/417



Erik Uzureau wrote:
> Dear Vector OLers,
>
> Hello there, my name is Erik and I'm one of the developers of
> OpenLayers. My colleague chris schmidt passed me your three names as
> the main people in charge of the Vector branch.
>
> I sent out an email a few weeks ago stating our intentions to try to
> merge the Vector branch into the trunk (as a build option, of course)
> and didn't get any feedback at the time. I thought maybe I would be
> better off addressing the three of you personally.
>
> The reason I'm writing is that I am travelling to Boston for the first
> week of March with specific instructions to pow-wow with chris and
> schuyler (two other original OL developers) and do the integration.
>
> Lamentably, due to time constraints, I have not been able to follow
> along the vector branch development as you guys have been working on
> it, so I'm very out of the loop.
>
> Chris has been somewhat monitoring the list, but I know that it would
> be enormously helpful for all of us if maybe one of the three of you
> could send us a quick summary email of the status of the branch.
>
> How far along is the development? What remains to be done? Are there
> any design decisions that remain to be taken? Unresolvable bugs?
>
> Part of the integration, of course, will be going through the code to
> match coding standards, as well as producing at least some basic
> documentation on how to use the new tools. Any help in this department
> would of course be well received.
>
> I hope this email finds you well. We are excited to finally have the
> resources (time) to dedicate to bringing this body of your work into
> the main trunk and making it easier for more people to use it. Thanks
> for all your hard work on this and hope to hear from you.
>
> Cheers,
> Erik
>


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5011
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254