[OpenLayers-Dev] Help on finalizing proposal for GSoC Project

[Sanjiv Singh]

Hi Devs,

  First of all congratulations for the amazing progress on OpenLayers
mapping toolkit. I am Sanjiv Singh, from New Delhi, India. I am a
prospective student for the GSoC this summer with the TurboGears Team.
TurboGears is a python rapid web application framework which supports the
use of widgets. Widgets provide an easy way for developers to provide
specific functionality on Turbogears webapps by encapsulating javascript,
css and the necessary view logic. Work is now on to migrate widgets to
ToscaWidgets which make this feature framework independent. e.g.
ToscaWidgets are now supported by both TurboGears and Pylon frameworks.
  As part of the GSoC project I have proposed to build ToscaWidgets for
enabling the use of OpenLayers javascript library for making it easy for
python web developers to provide mapping features on their web apps. I have
gone through the OpenLayers intro docs and the example user recipies. I have
to now decide what widgets to create and what functionality they would
provide?
  After my initial research on openLayers, I feel that there are three most
basic elements that all openlayers map would have. These are a map object,
one or more layers and one or more controls.
  I need some guidance on how I should partition the functionality into
different widgets so that all functionalities, from simple to more complex
ones, are covered without making the widget api too complicated. Too explain
the problem a bit more, I could have that one widget encapsulating the
entire feature set of openlayers. But in that case all information has to be
passed to the widget as parameter, which would make its interface too
complex.
  My initial thoughts are:
     One base widget - OLMap, which takes the list of layers as parameters
     Having subclasses -
          OLMapWithControls, which additionally takes the list of controls
          OLMapMapWithPopup, which additionally takes a list of popups and
their behavioral options
          OLMapEditable - Still not sure whether it is required as a
separate class

  Any thoughts, suggestions, ideas would be highly appreciated.

Regards
Sanjiv
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/openlayers-dev/attachments/20080328/8de7edd0/attachment.html