[OpenLayers-Dev] Servers down

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 05:52:26AM +1000, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> Chris,
> This brings up another point, reliability of OpenLayers servers.
> The OpenLayers tutorials encourage users to point to the Openlayers.js 
> from Metacarta. 

This is a problem. We should fix this. MetaCarta does not have the
resources to devote to ensuring any server is up. Even once we migrate
to OSGeo infrastructure, we don't have any guarentees of uptime: the
servers are run by volunteers, provided free of charge on the goodwill
of other organizations, etc.

Additionally, any service that uses the OpenLayers API live is going to
suffer excessive load times compared to rolling their own, because the
OpenLayers.js uses the 'full' build profile -- over 300kb now. 

It's fine for demos, and quick examples, but we need to change the docs
to state explicitly that users should not be depending on openlayers.org
to host the /api/ JS long term, unless/until such time as alternative
resources which provide some SLA are available.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta