Hello list,
Hereby the Eulogy for mapbuilder as spoken at the opening of the
Foss4G conference in Cape Town;
Hi,
My name is Steven Ottens and I'm speaking on behalve of the
mapbuilder steering committee.
It is with sadness in our heart that we've announced that
Mapbuilder is no more. It is today exactly 7 years ago that Cameron
Shorter posted his first mail on the Mapbuilder mailinglist. He set
apart his idea for a community mapbuilder which would provide a way
to collaboratively build maps. Years later this idea would be
proposed again in a different setting resulting in OpenStreetMap. It
took a while for Camerons idea to turn into mapbuilder code. The
intial idea was to create an applet and energy was put into the
GeoTools project to support OGC standards. However applets became a
thing of the past and Raj Singh created a prototype in a new
technique that years later would become known as AJAX.
It was already 2003 and during the christmas holidays the first
implementation of Mapbuilder was created. Still it would be a few
more months before the first release. Once the first release was out,
more people got attracted to the project. The already strong support
for open standards was increased by various people. Mike Adair wrote
the support for WMS-timeseries. Pat Cappelaere wrote the first ever
SVG based vector renderer for webgis. Olivier Terral created an SLD
editor upon Pats work. Also Mike Adair and Richard Greenwood started
the javascript projection library.
Already we are moving into 2006. This year will go down in history as
the beginning of the end of mapbuilder. A lot happened in 2006, it
began early that year with the founding of OSGeo, which Mapbuilder
joined as one of its founding projects. The power of OSGeo became
clear during the summer of 2006. People from different projects got
together to discuss project-transcending isues in foss4g land. The
foss4g conference that year saw the birth of the tiling standard and
the decission to use OpenLayers as /the/ render engine for webmapping
clients. Andreas Hocevar took lead in stitching OpenLayers and
mapbuilder together.
With incredible support of the openlayers developercommunity there
was a first release in less than six months. Mapbuilder had many
features OpenLayers was lacking in those days. The mapbuilder
developers contributed lots of code to the openlayers project to make
sure that all that functionality would still work once openlayers
became the backend.
To fully merge all Mapbuilders functionality with OpenLayers took
another year. Once that work was done it became clear that OpenLayers
was attracting many Mapbuilder developers and users. We found it
increasingly difficult to tell the difference between OpenLayers and
Mapbuilder. The powerful XML based MVC design was at the same time
its weakness. Over the years AJAX development had became mainstream
and the developer tools favored pure javascript implementations like
the one from OpenLayers. In that fateful conference in Lausanne we
already spoke out our hope that one day we would merge into one open
source webgis client. When we saw OpenLayers flourish under the OSGeo
flag we decided that our time had come.
We set out to create a client where you could access maps and add
your own data to share with others. If you go to the openstreetmap
site you will see openlayers as the client to access the maps and add
your own data. In a sense we have reached our goal. In the meantime
mapbuilder has touched many more people who are still active
contributers to foss4g. It set a standard in standard complience and
many of its ideas live on in different projects. So while we are sad
to announce that we stop our active development of Mapbuilder, we see
a bright future for the foss4g community. We hope that our example
will help others to join their efforts where possible, creating a
powerfull foss4g software stack.
signed the project steering committee,
Andreas Hocevar
Cameron Shorter
Gertjan van Oosten
Linda Derezinski
Matt Diez
Mike Adair
Olivier Terral
Patrice Cappalaere
Steven M. Ottens
Vincent Heurteaux
--
Steven M. Ottens -==-
http://research.geodan.nl/planet-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/_______________________________________________
mapbuilder-devel mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mapbuilder-devel
