[OpenLayers-Dev] Vector Integration

[Erik Uzureau]

Thanks a bunch for this summary, Cameron. This is a great start
towards the integration.

For the moment at least, the breakdown of stage 1 / stage 2 seems
reasonable, and I think most of what we are immediately concerned with
(for the 5 day coding spree) is stage 1.

I think we should tackle the following in this order:

> * I'm not sure what the state of our UML design at the moment, but I
> suspect it should be updated.

I did not know there was a UML diagram for this code. That would be a
huge help to see if you have it and it is accurate. Keeping in mind
that I know next to nothing about what has been done or how it works,
this is a great starting point for me at least to get the big picture
of how the code works. Could someone find that doc for us?

> * 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
Once the main design has been reviewed and approved, the next logical
step is to go over the code carefully, making sure it flows well with
the rest of the OL codebase. As we do this we can go along updating
the JSDOC tags.

> * There was no wiki documentation
This shouldnt be too terribly difficult. The important thing to do
here is to write out a few basic tutorial style docs and make some
example html files that demonstrate the functionality. The idea that
we've been shooting for in OL is to make most of the API-ish
documentation automatically generated from the JSDOC tags. Assuming we
get those in place and uptodate, we shouldnt have to worry *too* much
about this.

> * There were no unit tests
This is a _must_do_ if we want to insure the integrity of the code for
future OL releases and development. My hope is that we will have time
to get some of the basic framework for the testing set up and
underway. Test writing is something that can easily be done in
parallel and without too much coordination effort, so we should
concentrate on getting the framework in place and then dividing up the
task for people to work on individually.

I'll reiterate here that we are open to help with this from anyone out
there in the community who knows this code or who is interested in
getting to know it a little better. At this point, the major design
decisions have been made and implemented, so the idea is not so much
setting up a forum for ideas but rather more of a collective push to
put the final touches and polishing on this code and get it fully
integrated into the main branch.

Thanks again to anyone interested,
Erik

> 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
>
>