[maplab-users] MapLab 2.2 release and beyond

[Dave McIlhagga]

MapLab Users,

Today we are releasing MapLab 2.2, but before going through that I 
wanted to include some information to the community about this release 
and plans for the future.

The most important news it that MapLab 2.2 is likely to be the last 
major release in the 2.x stream of the technology. There may be a series 
of 2.2.x releases to fix any serious bugs that may come up.

There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that we are 
looking ahead to a future MapLab 3.0 that will be completely redesigned 
to act as a better more intuitive cartography tool that will complement 
application development with MapServer, and in particular for Chameleon.

In the past year we have conducted some technology experiments to see 
how far we can push cartographic tools in a web environment - some of 
you have seen this in the form of Studio and some very early MapLab 3.0 
technology attempts.

At this point - we are going to be consolidating our various 
experiements to come up with a long-term product strategy for MapLab 
including timeframes for development and of course, securing funding to 
support this effort. We can provide no guarantees at this time as to 
what that will be -- but we hope to have a clearer idea for this in the 
months ahead.

If any of you in the community are interested in becoming actively 
engaged in this effort, please let us know (you can reply to me directly 
if you wish) as we are keen to get any help we can and importantly, to 
get your thoughts on what you would like to see in the future.

Thanks for using this technology -- below is the information on the 
release of Maplab 2.2.

Dave
-- 
Dave McIlhagga
President, DM Solutions Group

http://www.dmsolutions.ca
EMail : dmcilhagga at dmsolutions.ca
Phone : 613-565-5056 x15
Fax : 613-565-0925





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As a service to the Maplab community, a final release of Maplab (version 
2.2) is now available for download at http://maptools.org/maplab. There 
is an MS4W package, a tarball distribution for Unix and a zip file for 
Windows. Only the MS4W version is pre-configured to work as is.

If you are using a Windows system, please use the MS4W version as it 
will save you a lot of configuration time (see http://maptools.org/ms4w)

----------
release notes:

MapLab 2.2

This version cleans up some documentation problems and addresses certain 
annoyances and bugs in the interface. It requires Mapserver 4.0 and 
works best with verion 4.2. Apart from bug fixes, this will be the last 
Maplab 2.x version.

Changes:
- updated documentation
- new dhtml color picker
- made raw source window resizable
- removed some unnecessary fields from config files
- added more mapserver 4 fields to objects
- added WFS as a connection type

Bugs:
- tracked down most php warnings
- removed illegal 'NAME' parameter from STYLE object
- forced selection of valid data type for layers
- cleaned tutorial symbol file
- fixed a problem with the tutorial link for ms4w installs
- improved handling of join objects (thanks to Franck Villoin)