[OpenLayers-Dev] OpenLayers 2.9 Release Candidate 1

[Bart van den Eijnden]

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the first release candidate of OpenLayers 2.9!

As of 2.9-RC1, the OpenLayers 2.9 release closes 181 outstanding tickets, with 82 of those being bugfixes.

We invite you to help us test the 2.9 release candidate! To test 2.9 in your applications, include the following tag in your OpenLayers-powered page:

<script src="http://openlayers.org/api/2.9-rc1/OpenLayers.js"></script>

As always, the source is available at http://openlayers.org/download/. Bug reports can be filed in Trac, under the 2.9 RC1 version and 2.9 milestone.

The 2.9 release adds a number of important features, the full list of which can be found in the Release Notes, at http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.9/Notes. Some of the highlights include:

* Graticule control
* TransformFeature control
* Atom format
* Catalogue Services for the Web (CS-W) format
* Refresh strategy for automatically refreshing layers
* Basic Sensor Observation Service (SOS) support
* WMS 1.3 support
... and many other new features and bug fixes that you can see detailed in the release notes linked above.

For information on possible changes that will need to be made between this version of OpenLayers and previous versions, please look at the Release notes, available at the Release Notes information[1].

All forthcoming RC announcements will be sent only to the Developers list: anyone interested in tracking the progress to a final release should subscribe[2] to that list.

We look forward to your feedback on this release.

[1] http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.9/Notes#CompatibilityNotes 
[2] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev