OSGeo Hacking Event in Bolsena (day one)

The first day of the annual OSGeo Hacking Event in Bolsena, Italy, already made the Mapbender Team sweat, not only because of intense sunshine and ridiculously abundant food portions (served by our own chef, Enzo), but also because of the progress made in various aspects.

We addressed OSGeo's initiative to measure project maturity by discussing along the given guidelines, finally summing it up in the Mapbender wiki. Although being mature in almost every aspect, we were also able to identify some issues we can improve in the near future. Thanks to Andrea Aimee for bringing this topic up in the OSGeo discuss mailing list.

We also worked on integrating OpenLayers in Mapbender, slowly replacing all functionality in Mapbender with its OpenLayers counterpart. Today we focussed on wrapping the OpenLayers Panel in a jQuery plugin, allowing an admin to create button sets just like in the current Mapbender version.

Other topics included release planning: We are definitely going to release Mapbender 2.6.1 by the end of the week. We also decided to release a 3.0 version early, in order to allow people to follow the current development of Mapbender. However, this 3.0 version will be delivered with a very limited set of functionality, the upside being that it will rely completely on OpenLayers as a map viewer, and being thoroughly tested.

In order to guarantee the availability of a stable and full-fledged Mapbender, we will also release Mapbender 2.7. So the Mapbender 2 series will continue, until the 3 series contains all functionality that are essential for users now. Both 2.7 and 3.0 will be released prior to FOSS4G, which takes place in Barcelona in early September.

Tomorrow we will report again from day two of this magical event. Thanks to Jeroen Ticheler for making it happen, and also a big thanks to WhereGroup and FOSSGIS e.V. for sponsoring.