[OpenLayers-Dev] ANNOUNCEMENT: OpenLayers 2.11 RC1!

[christopher.schmidt at nokia.com]

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the first release
candidate of OpenLayers 2.11!

As of 2.11-RC1, the OpenLayers 2.11 release closes 380 outstanding
tickets, and offers great improvements in the area of performance
and mobile support.

We invite you to help us test the 2.11 release candidate! To test 2.11
in your applications, include the following tag in your
OpenLayers-powered page:

<script src="http://openlayers.org/api/2.11-rc1/OpenLayers.js"></script>

As always, the source is available at http://openlayers.org/download/.
Bug reports can be filed in Trac, under the 2.11 RC1 version and 2.11
milestone.

The 2.11 release adds several important features. Some of the highlights
include:

 * Greatly improved mobile support, with a focus on touch devices.
 * Many performance improvements, focused on improving the user
   experience when dragging the map
 * Additional ways of accessing Bing Maps tiles, and other new
   layer types
 * Continued improvements in the areas of protocol support, including
   the addition of a JSONP protocol.
... and many other bug fixes.

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].

Overall, OpenLayers 2.11 offers greatly improved performance for all
users. It offers broad mobile support, based in large part on
sponsorship from a number of organizations during a code sprint in
Switzerland[2], and as a side effect of this work, many components
related to mobile support have been extended. This release promotes a
major step forward for OpenLayers on mobile devices.

I want to include a special thank you to all of our sponsors, who helped
make a huge difference in this release, and without whom the impressive
support for OpenLayers on touch devices like the iPhone and Android
platform would likely not be possible. Thanks especially to Camptocamp
and OpenGeo for helping to organize the sprint, and to all the
organizations who participated and funded the events.

[1] http://trac.osgeo.org/openlayers/wiki/Release/2.11/Notes
[2] http://openlayers.org/blog/2011/02/25/mobile-sprint-day-five/

--
Christopher Schmidt