When your background data don't change

I am watching the MapTiler project closely now. I once started to look into the GDAL2Tiles utility to scratch an itch I had for making simple online maps from data data would not change with any real frequency (never -> semi-annually). The itch went away so I stopped playing around, but it was a reasonable option at the time.

Now that the project has a GUI and someone providing care and feeding, I also have had the itch return. So, I might get a chance to run with this ball after all.

I am really enjoying watching the OSgeo ecosphere mature as the standards of WMS, TMS, GeoJSON, GeoRSS, KML, etc seep into the industry. It is just getting ridiculously easy to integrate stuff in basic ways.

Notes from Fee

James Fee has some good notes from the ESRI Dev Summit this year. He also has a nice show regarding using the Openlayers API against services from ArcGIS Server. The exact support for ESRI-specific services in OL 2.8 depends on what came out of the 2.8 release triage meeting.

I am excited about the prospects of true OL support for ESRI services.

If you follow this thread through to the end, it sounds like there is some chance that Arc* support will make it into the 2.8 OpenLayers release at least in experimental form.

I feel compelled to reuse the Lord of the Rings quote in a techy context (I know this is getting cliche):

"One framework to rule them all, one framework to find them, one framework to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."