[ka-Map-users] ka-Map and OpenLayers

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Hi Paul,

This is very interesting! I finally had a few minutes to skim over the 
openlayers.org site (I probably did not do it justice and will read more 
later).

I think Steve L. question of what is the benefit is a good one. I can 
see a lot of work ahead for the developers to convert to prototype.js 
that you might want to avoid, which is not a bad thing. Also combining 
efforts might be good also.

I think the pain for existing users might be might be very high, and 
ka-map might just end up forking and taking on a life of its own.

Is getting support for mapguide in ka-map play any part of the driver 
for this?

In general, I think a lot of the effort that has been going into ka-map 
is to make it more modular, which is a very good thing. It is also very 
good that that this effort has been happening with new feature 
development. I would hate for this to stop or even backup to get it 
integrated into openlayers.

Do you have a sense for how long it would take to integrate and get back 
to current functionality?

Do you have a sense for how long it would take to integrate prototype.js 
into ka-map? or some other appropriate library?

The article the Aaron post leaves me a little concerned about using 
prototype.js. Does this concern anyone else? How has openlayers dealt 
with this problem.

Schuyler, thanks for your post, that answer a lot of additional questions.

-Steve

Paul Spencer wrote:
> Hello ka-Mappers!
> 
> I had a very interesting discussion with the developers of OpenLayers, a 
> javascript api for tiled maps.  Turns out OpenLayers and ka-Map are very 
> similar.  We decided that it would be beneficial for both communities if 
> we attempted to merge the projects.  The purpose of this email is to 
> present this idea to the ka-Map community in order to generate some 
> discussion on the subject.
> 
> OpenLayers is hosted at http://www.openlayers.org/.  They have some very 
> interesting objectives which I think are compatible with ka-Map.  Take a 
> look at their site.
> 
> OpenLayers is written on top of prototype.js, which was one of the 
> things I was planning to do with ka-Map in the next couple of weeks.  It 
> has a very nice looking architecture and the code base is very readable.
> 
> It is lacking quite a few things that ka-Map has:
> 
> * core tiling engine is very similar, but it is not quite as optimal 
> (doesn't reuse images for instance)
> 
> * overlay stuff is point/text only
> 
> * lacking tools (layer controls, scale bar etc) and the windowing stuff
> 
> * lacking query capability
> 
> * tile caching
> 
> * probably several other things I can't think of right now
> 
> I think that there are some differences in how OpenLayers and ka-Map 
> approach things, but I'm not entirely sure that they are significant.
> 
> At this point, I am proposing to join the two projects into a single 
> project.  My desired approach would be to start with the OpenLayers code 
> and start to bring over the parts of ka-Map that I(we) feel are missing.
> 
> Please let me know what you think of this.  And point out all the 
> problems you can think of.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Paul
> 
> +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
> |Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
> +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
> |Applications & Software Development                              |
> |DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
> +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
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