open source basecamp

MapFish has been announced at FOSS4G 2007 and encountered a very big interest in the community of users and developers. Very high end features has come out on the server and client sides.
We have seen strong signs from the community that MapFish should and could be used to build web mapping application in an even wider range than today.
And, at FOSS4G 2008 discussions with the community about the possibilities to use MapFish technology occured. This showed the maturity and pertinence of MapFish. Because of that, the MapFish community decided to wider the use of the core technology of MapFish to other areas that could need it. MapFish team, with other community members decided to launch and contribute to GeoExt to achieve this goal.
This clearly puts MapFish at a leader place as OS framework to build high end webmapping applications.

A nice tutorial presents how to use MapFish with TurboGears.

In the last few days, a lot of activities happened around GeoExt.

But, what is the goal of GeoExt and how is it related to MapFish ?

- The goal of the GeoExt library is to aggregate OpenLayers and ExtJS in order to provide easy to use components for the creation of client UI. In my dreams, I see this kind of application with map based components for the configuration of web mapping solutions
- MapFish uses GeoExt as a standalone library and has specific client components based on GeoExt.
- GeoExt is server agnostic.
- MapFish server is able to work with GeoExt components.

The creation GeoExt library has just been initiated, but I will soon be able to present nice things part of this library.

I just wrote a call for participation for the GeoExt project: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2008-December/004794.html. If you are interested, don’t hesitate

A new feature has been added to MapFish trunk with ticket #300:
the ability to have a single click PDF generation. Basically you can have a toolbar button to generate a PDF showing at least all the map currently visible in your OpenLayers map.

To see it in action, go to the MapFish examples (trunk version) and click the button just over the top-left corner of the map:
http://demo.mapfish.org/mapfishsample/trunk/examples/print/simple.html