[OpenLayers-Dev] Direction planning for Mapbuilder - and further integration with Openlayers/Mapfish

[Cameron Shorter]

Mapbuilder 1.5rc1 was released just before Christmas and now we are 
defining our future direction, which is likely to include further 
integration with Openlayers possibly Mapfish.
We welcome Openlayers and Mapfish developers to join mapbuilder-devel 
and contribute to our discussions.

Mapbuilder's latest notable improvements are:
* Greater stability of the 1.5 thread.
* Integration of Openlayers as the Mapbuilder rendering engine
* A restructuring of projection code, now called Proj4js, and now usable 
by Openlayers.

Thanks in particular go to Andreas who has been the powerhouse behind 
this release.

Today's Mapbuilder team meeting focused on "What next?".
Logs at: http://uwyn.com/drone/log/bevinbot/mapbuilder/20080107

In summary:
* We pay tribute to the excellent work and developments in Openlayers 
and would like to continue to collaborate rather than compete with 
Openlayers.
* In future Mapbuilder releases, we would like to provide value add to 
Openlayers in the areas that Openlayers is not addressing, rather than 
compete head to head on the standard generic web mapping features.
* We note that OL folks have been discussing an Openlayers plugin 
concept. Mapbuilder may be able to fill this role and the migration path 
is less onerous now due to the last round of integration work.
* Next steps are:
1. Identify the worthy areas of Mapbuilder which are not covered or not 
covered well by Openlayers and would be best covered by a project like 
Mapbuilder. (I hope OL folks can help us refine these).
2. Revise Mapbuilder priorities and design goals to reflect future 
direction.
3. Design
4. Prototype
5. Code
6. ... rest of development cycle

Here are some ideas about what Mapbuilder is currently strong(er) at. 
Contributions/comments welcome.

* XSLT processing. Mapbuilder allows widgets to be rendered using XSL to 
build HTML.
* XSL chaining. Convert one XML document to another XML doc when the 
first changes.
* Model/View/Controller design pattern. Multiple widgets can be driven 
from one model. Model doesn't need to know about the widget rendering 
its data. This leads to the concept of "Mapbuilder being a framework".
OL supports this in the Map object and multiple controls. I'm not sure 
whether OL supports the concept for other models. Eg for a WMC document, 
or an OWS Context document.
* Natively stores XML documents, which means that there is no loss of 
data in importing/exporting. This helps compatibility with OGC standards 
which currently are mainly XML based.
* Mapbuilder is easily configurable via a config file. I''m aware of 
mixed feelings about the value of this. However it would be make it easy 
to create a drag-and-drop web page builder.


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions
http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html