[OpenLayers-Users] feature requests

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 03:49:13PM -0400, Chris Holmes wrote:
> Ok, so there's a few things I'd love to see openlayers able to do.  I'm
> happy to put these in to trac, but thought I'd raise them on the list
> for discussion first.  Feel free to break up in to their own threads.

Discussion of these on #openlayers lead to the conclusion that these are
all *excellent* use cases of OpenLayers. They prove a lot of things that
we've been discussing about OpenLayers, and makes points as to why
OpenLayers has a different way of doing things than, for example,
Community MapBuilder, or even ka-Map, because defining and adding new
layers on the fly seems to be something these other packages don't
currently have a lot of support for on the client side.

However, none of these require any changes to the OpenLayers core, or if
they do, they're only minimal: You should be able to provide all these
features at the application level.

Once these features are done, they would prove to be great examples of
what OpenLayers is good at, and great showcases of the possibilities in
the browser that have not yet been exploited. 

I think that we will see some of these developed as demos of OpenLayers
in the near-term, but please do feel free to implement any of these as a
demo of the OpenLayers flexibility, and we will most likely set
these up within the OpenLayers Gallery[1], and if possible, commit them
back to the examples directory of the main subversion repository for
others to build upon.

If you do find that some feature you need is lacking in the OpenLayers
API, please feel free to open a trac ticket (and send email to the list
so we can slot it into the roadmap where it belongs).

[1] http://openlayers.org/gallery/

> 
> WFS-T is first on my list.  Even if it was just for points, it would be
> very cool, and indeed that would handle a lot of simple uses.  WFS-T
> would just be a persistent store for users marking up a map.  It'd be
> nice to handle insert (new marker), delete (remove marker) and update
> (change a value).  On the update stuff Raj recently put together a nice
> little ajax thing to actually update in the pop-up box.  This could
> easily be done in openlayers too, something like if you double click on
> one of the fields in the pop-up then it goes from text to an editable
> field, maybe with an 'update' button by it or some such.
> 
> Further WFS-T features would be cool, ability to edit a line or polygon,
> but would probably require SVG/microsoft's thing to be useful, which is
> obviously a non-trivial amount of work.  Of course OSM would probably
> like it a lot too.  Indeed it'd be great if OpenLayers could be used to
> edit WFS-T and OSM.
> 
> Next up is a pretty basic one, that would be super nice to have.  Let
> users add their own WMS.  Like instead of having to configure the
> script, I could just click a button that says 'add wms', and then I'd
> just supply the base url, the typename, and any additional parameters.
> I think this would be nice to show the power of WMS, that the openlayers
> map you're viewing is not static, but open to your interpretation.
> (past this it'd be awesome to add SLD editing, so you could also have
> clients style their map as they want, and use SLD post to tell the
> server to make the map different, but that's another pretty big project).
> 
> The next step past user added WMS is to let the user persist it.
> Basically I'd be able to add a few WMS servers, and then hit 'save
> configuration' and my browser would let me save the javascript config to
> disk, which I can then set up on my own webpage.  I think this could 
> have great potential, allowing people to remix their own maps easily 
> (esp. if combined with SLD editing so they could actually change the 
> cartography as they like, instead of just composing layers).
> 
> Beyond that one could do through the web configuration, instead of
> having the configuration exported out for use in a new web page, an
> 'admin' could log in and change the root configuration.  So it'd persist
> the new WMSes added.  But this feature probably isn't worth the effort,
> since it'd be a bitch to do some admin log-in, and even the admin could
> just export it out and save it to the same location.  But there could be
> some cool admin operations beyond that, let users configure everything
> through the web, not have to know anything about javascript to fully
> configure their map.
> 
> keep up the great work guys, I'm excited to see what's next.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chris Holmes
> The Open Planning Project
> http://topp.openplans.org
> 

> begin:vcard
> fn:Chris Holmes
> n:Holmes;Chris
> org:The Open Planning Project
> adr:;;377 Broadway, 11th Floor;New York;NY;10013;USA
> email;internet:cholmes at openplans.org
> title:VP, Strategic Development
> x-mozilla-html:FALSE
> url:http://topp.openplans.org
> version:2.1
> end:vcard
> 

> _______________________________________________
> Users mailing list
> Users at openlayers.org
> http://mailman-viper.python-hosting.com/listinfo/users


-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer