Slashgeo

The Chris GISMo blog tells us OpenLayers 2.0 has been released. From the press release: "OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License. This new release of OpenLayers supports a number of new layer types, including support for Virtual Earth, Google, and more, alongside WMS, WFS, KaMap, and GeoRSS." The official website.

Dave Bouwman not only discuss MapServer, but the installation process of OpenLayers and a WMS server. From the blog: "Again, this is not the least bit earth shattering, and it's a loooong way from a production application or an in-depth understanding, but the total time investment thus far (including this write up) has been a little over one hour. Thus, I think it's safe to say that the basic learning curve here is now in the realm of reasonable. Will your manager set this up? No. But this is no more complex (and may be simpler) than setting up ArcIMS or ArcGIS Server."

The OpenLayers blog announced the beginning of a list of OpenLayers case studies: "Currently, the number of case studies is small, but we’re working on growing these case studies so that for any particular application, there is an example of someone who has used OpenLayers to do something similar."

Meanwhile, Spatially Adjusted discusses the integration of OpenLayers with ESRI's ArcGIS suite: "As more people start using OpenLayers with the ESRI ArcGIS Server we’ll hopefully get it integrated into the OpenLayer code. For now you can grab some of the code from the OpenLayer Wiki and start using OpenLayers with your ArcGIS Server applications. People are doing amazing things with OpenLayers including this example with ArcGIS Server (which doesn’t use the REST API, but it is still wonderful) from the Long Island Index." The latest was mentioned on Slashgeo a month ago. See also related stories below.

Christopher Schmidt of MetaCarta who is one of, if not the chief developer of OpenLayers just made the following announcement on the OpenLayers Mailing list :
"http://www.whitehouse.gov/change/

A map put together by the white house using OpenLayers, including stories of people who are "delivering on change"."

I am a big fan of OpenLayers and am happy to see them getting this kind of penetration. I think it's also worth noting that OpenStreetMap data is used as the basemap, which is also a great accomplishment for them.

Despite we frequently mention OpenLayers here, some users might be interested by GeoWeb Guru's nice technical overview of OpenLayers. The introduction: "OpenLayers is a popular open source JavaScript library for displaying dynamic map data in a web page. The OpenLayers library can work as the client half of an AJAX map application, including modern features such as "slippy" maps. Most if not all of the map data is provided by servers running other software. OpenLayers supports a wide range of different map sources, making it a popular way to combine a wide range of different data types into one map." See also related stories below.

Cedric Moullet writes "GeoExt brings together the geospatial know how of OpenLayers with the user interface savvy of Ext JS to help you build powerful desktop style GIS apps on the web with JavaScript. The GeoExt community is proud to announce the first release candidate of GeoExt 0.5, the first GeoExt version to be released. You find more information on this RC1 on the GeoExt blog. And don't miss the doc in order to make your first steps with this great library ;-)"

GeoExt writes "The GeoExt community is proud to announce the release of GeoExt 0.5, the first GeoExt version to be released. GeoExt brings together the geospatial power of OpenLayers with the user interface savvy of Ext JS to help you build powerful desktop style GIS applications on the web with JavaScript. GeoExt is available under the BSD license and is supported by a growing community of individuals, businesses and organizations. GeoExt 0.5 comes with a fine selection of widgets and data access components for rich web-based geospatial applications, the full list of which can be found in the Release Notes. Some of the highlights include:

• MapPanel for seamless integration of OpenLayers maps in Ext JS applications
• LegendPanel to display legends for WMS layers
• LayerNodes and LayerContainers to create customized layer switchers in Ext trees
• Popups as anchored Ext windows
• Ext data components for convenient handling of OpenLayers data structures like layers and vector features

Learn more: for downloads and documentation, please visit the GeoExt website." See also related stories below.

Geoweb Guru shares an interesting entry named Optimizing OpenLayers. From the entry: "And the result? The final OpenLayers.js has shrunk more than 50% from 711KB to 343KB. This will reduce the website bandwidth requirements, but more importantly, it will result in a web map that loads and becomes active more quickly for the end user. [...] The trial-and-error approach to building a configuration file that produces a minimal but usable OpenLayers.js, is time consuming to say the least. Tom MacWright is in the process of solving this with his OpenLayerer online build tool." See also related stories below.