Re: [Mapbuilder-users] End of life for Community Mapbuilder

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dear mapBuilder friends,

just to say congratulations for the work developed till now in MapBuilder;
it has been a really good job and consider a pity you stop developping but
you know the reasons much better than me.

maybe because it was my first big webgis project but I learned a lot with
it. I've to say it was hard to costumize your own tool because mapBuilder
uses a lot of different technologies (DOM, js, XSLT...) but after some time
learning it's great (the good documentation also helped a lot).

cheers and thanks for all,

Pere Roca

biòleg i especialista GIS
visita EDIT mapviewer! (prototype)
http://edit.csic.es/edit_geo/prototype/edit.html

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   
> 
> 
> End of life for Community Mapbuilder
> We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the
> time has come for the Community
> Mapbuilder 
> project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5
> version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned
> enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive,
> a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user
> queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into
> history. 
> Why?
> Mapbuilder is a stable,
> feature rich, standards compliant, fast, webmapping framework with a
> strong developer community. Why has it come to the end of its life? 
> The
> browser based webmapping space has become crowded and other webmapping
> clients have increased in functionality and attractiveness to users. In
> particular, Openlayers is simpler to use, has attracted an increabibly
> strong developer community, has good quality control and development
> processes, and has developed most of the webmapping functionality
> previously only offered by Mapbuilder. Basically Openlayers is
> attacting the majority of the users and developers that previously
> would have used Mapbuilder. One day someone will write a compelling
> paper on the history of the two similar projects and analyse the key
> differences and decision points which led to one project out shining
> the other. 
> But we are not crying
> Well,
> maybe we feel a twing of loss for the Mapbuilder project we started
> years ago, but in the bigger picture, we see the retiring of Mapbuilder
> as a good thing. It will allow the greater web mapping community to
> consolidate and rally around the remaining webmapping tools &#8211; in
> particular, around Openlayers. 
> There has been significant
> collaboration between the Mapbuilder and Openlayers communities over
> the last couple of years. Mapbuilder has incorporated Openlayers as its
> rendering engine and fetures have been shared between projects. In many
> cases, developers from both projects worked together on the same
> codebase (in Openlayers), then ported up to Mapbuilder. This was a
> deliberate move toward the merging of the two developer communities and
> most of the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee have contributed to
> the Openlayers codebase. 
> So in essence, by changing our
> allegience from Mapbuilder to Openlayers we take with us some of our
> code, we replace some features with equivalent Openlayers features, we
> take our community with us, and we gain an existing, robust and
> welcoming community. 
> What should Mapbuilder users do?
> Users
> have a few options. You already own the source code, so you are welcome
> to continue maintaining and extending the Mapbuilder code for as long
> as you like. At some point, users will likely want to upgrade, and at
> that point we suggest considering Openlayers for your application. It
> now provides the majority of the fuctionality that was previously only
> offered by Mapbuilder. 
> What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo?
> Having
> a graduated OSGeo project retire might be seen as an embarassment for
> OSGeo, however, I'd argue it is a strength. It shows two projects
> growing together under the OSGeo umbrella and evenually merging into a
> stronger, more focused community. 
> However, it does raise a
> dilemma with regards to what should be done with a retired project.
> Some of the key OSGeo criteria, like &#8220;Community Backing&#8221; and
> &#8220;Best of
> Breed Software&#8221; will gradually be lost, so we should not continue to
> promote Mapbuilder. Still, we wouldn't want to erase Mapbuilder's
> history with OSGeo as our community has documented valuable lessons
> learned during the graduation process. 
> I suggest a new &#8220;retired&#8221; category be created which keeps
> track of
> retired projects. 
> Thanks
> We,
> the project steering committee, have derived a huge amount of pleasure
> building Mapbuilder and working with the Mapbuilder Community. For many
> of us, Mapbuilder has been a launching pad into a fullfilling Open
> Source and/or Geospatial career. We'd like to thank all the users,
> developers and supporters of Mapbuilder we have met along the way. 
> 
> 
> 
> The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance):
> 
> 
>   
>     Cameron Shorter 
>   
>   
>     Mike Adair 
>   
>   
>     Patrice Cappelaere 
>   
>   
>     Steven M. Ottens 
>   
>   
>     Matt Diez 
>   
>   
>     Olivier Terral 
>   
>   
>     Andreas Hocevar 
>   
>   
>     Gertjan van Oosten 
>   
>   
>     Linda Derezinski 
>   
> 
> 
> -- 
> Cameron Shorter
> Geospatial Systems Architect
> Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
> Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
> 
> Think Globally, Fix Locally
> Commercial Support for Geospatial Open Source Solutions
> http://www.lisasoft.com/LISAsoft/SupportedProducts.html 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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