[Geowanking] Cartagen - client-side vector based map renderer, dynamic maps

[Chris Holmes]

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 02:41:36PM -0400, Jeffrey Warren wrote:
>> Absolutely, Christopher - I'm a big admirer of the OpenLayers community, and
>> the things you can do with it are impressive. Still, I haven't seen an
>> implementation of an entire map in vector on the client side - examples such
>> as this:
>> http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/wfs-reprojection.html
>>
>> ...which are great, still use a pre-rendered tile base layer. What I'm
>> hoping is that by sending *only* vector data, mappers can completely design
>> maps from the ground up with their own GSS stylesheets.
> 
> Like http://crschmidt.net/mapping/choropleth.html ? (Note that the
> styling suppot here was written before SLD support was implemented, and
> could now be done entirely using SLD instead of custom OpenLayers
> rules.)
> 

Contributing to OpenLayers++

Cartagen looks to have some cool ideas, but it'd be really awesome if it
was done by improving OpenLayers core and being a thin layer on top
that's optimized for Android and iPhone.

We've been thinking about GSS/Cascadenik type ideas, but having it go to
and from OpenLayers Style objects, as an alternative to SLD.  See
http://opengeo.org/services/coredevelopment/openlayers/css_styling/

It'd be really great to have a web designer friendly alternative to SLD.
  It may be a bit too early right now, but at some point we should start
an adhoc spec group, following on the successes of GeoRSS, GeoJSON, and
WMS-C, to make a standard for CSS for Map Styling.  It'd be great to be
able to share styles between GeoServer, Mapnik and MapServer, and to use
Openlayers as a cross platform style editor (or the common basis for
different approaches to map styling).  We'd be interested in
collaborating on a spec, and on implementations for OpenLayers and
GeoServer.

Chris.


-- 
Chris Holmes
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.