OpenLayers 2.7 Released | Fuzzy Tolerance

With all of the FOSS releases lately and those coming this month (Django 1.0, OpenOffice 3.0, Ubuntu 8.10), I hardly know what to do with myself. But I just ran across this one on Slashgeo, and I think it deserves some special recognition.

In the ohboyohboyohboy department, OpenLayers 2.7 has been released.

OpenLayers is a JavaScript mapping library, and it is awesome. The coolness continues with this release, including:

183 bug fixes
Lots of stuff for vector layers (Vector-Behavior, improved rendering performance, Z and Y ordering)
Canvas rendering class
OpenLayers.Request interface for AJAX
Smarter Popups
ZoomPanel and PanPanel controls for adding custom panning and zooming controls
Basic Measurement Control
Support for GPX files
Improvements to GML, SLD, and other formats
Lots more! See the release notes for full details.

One thing that isn’t going down is the size of the JavaScript library itself. With all of these features comes a price, and right now that price is sitting at 559kb, about 100kb bigger than 2.6. You will definitely want to build your own library with just the features you need with their handy build.py tool. Doing that for one of my bigger sites gets the library down to ~200kb, which is goes through the tubes quite a bit quicker.

I’ve done some limited testing, and I can’t find anything that breaks code from 2.6. Now I’m off to try out some of the new goodies.