[OpenLayers-Dev] Status of vector creation and editing tools

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Hi OL Devs,

I am trying to figure out what the current state of vector creation and 
editing tools are. I have been reading through some of my archived mail
and reviewing the examples:

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/editingtoolbar.html

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/modify-feature.html
This demo does not seem to support deleting a vertex only adding more.

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/select-feature.html

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/wfs-scribble.html
Demos some tools for saving created features.

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/wfs-t.html
This is broken at the moment.

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/vector-formats.html
Excellent demo on formats and fetching the feature on hover.

So it seems we have a lot of the pieces in place.

The things I do not see at the moment are:
1) any way to attach attributes to a feature or to edit/display 
attributes of a feature. Obviously features would need to belong to 
classes and each class of feature would need a schema to define the 
attributes for the class. Then it would be fairly straight forward to 
create a simple attribute table deplay/editor.
2) shared boundary nodes, or a join node
3) snapping to other features or feature nodes. I would be nice to be 
able to have a gravity so when you get close to an object the mouse 
snaps to an edge and tracks along the edge if you are close to it, and 
if you get close to a vertex on an edge or point it will snap to that.
4) join two features together to make a single object (maybe server side)
5) split a line at a point, or polygon with a line or with a boolean op 
(maybe server side)


Has anyone put together a application that allows for the creation, 
storing and editing of geometry based on these tools? Beyond the 
examples. What are you using for the backend storage? It seems like the 
two backends that I have seen mentioned are geoserver and feature 
server, others? do either of these support postGIS as the data store?

What are people doing or thinking about from a multi-user perspective? 
Either with separate feature pools or shared feature pools. The later 
obviously has some feature locking issues.

I think all the above is working in 2.4, is this correct?
What will be added as part of 2.5? What otehr functionality is available 
in the sandboxes in this arena?

This is an exciting area of development. It would be cool if a more 
complete working demo could be built up based on these tools so it could 
be used as a spring board to build specific applications from.

I have to say I am impressed and this goes further than I knew before 
researching this. Nice job all.

-Steve