OpenLayers 2.6 Released | Fuzzy Tolerance

In the ohboy-ohboy-ohboy department, OpenLayers 2.6 has been released.

OpenLayers is a great open source (BSD) JavaScript mapping library used by a lot of projects, including Geospatial Portal. It’s like the Swiss Army Knife of JavaScript mapping libraries, including rendering of just about anything you can think of (raster, vector, WMS, WFS, KML, GML, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, and many more), all of your standard pan/zoom/layer control features, WFS feature editing, markers, popups, drawing features…..the list goes on and on.

What’s new in this release?

Resolved 294 bug tickets.
Better looking, Google-ish popups.
Improved panning on commercial data providers (Google, Yahoo, etc.).
Animated panning and zooming image transitions on the map.
Client-side reprojection support (proj4js library for things other than spherical mercator).
Improved styling, including SLD support for vector services.
Improvements to KML, GML, and GeoRSS support.
New ScaleLine Control for a scale bar.
Navigation History control for map history navigation.
And more!

I’ve been playing around with it, and the first good news is I haven’t found anything from 2.5 that was broken - all the code I’ve tried still works. The new popups are a welcome addition - not quite as pretty as Google’s, but much better than the old ones - and the transitions and animations are great eye candy. The kitchen-sink library has also grown quite a bit to accomodate these new features (458KB), so rolling your own with just the components you need is becoming less of an option and more of a must. Fortunately, build.py in the build folder makes that fairly straight-forward.

Congratulations to the OpenLayers folks on another great build! When I get Geospatial Portal tweaked out with the new library I’ll post a new build on the project page.