open source basecamp

Nice application. One small hint: use jsbuild to build your javascript library in production environments

… also named GeoExt UX. The idea behind the GeoExt UX is to propose ready to use high level components.
Here are some UX:

GeoNames Search

Test it !

Routing

Test it !

Street View

Test it !

There is also a Google Earth UX (with WMS), a display projection selector, a scale selector, some toolbar components or spatial shortcuts.

The redlining tool is under development, like the Printing (with MapFish print server), the client Printer or the layer manager.

All information related to the UX can be found here: http://trac.geoext.org/wiki/Community.

If you have proposals for other UX or modification of existing UX, don’t hesitate to provide any ideas.

A very nice Web TripPlanner has been developped with GeoExt: http://ride.trimet.org/

If you want to integrate Google StreetView within your GeoExt application, the StreetViewPanel can be of interest.

A demo can be found here
Testers are welcome for this beta

After some discussion at Foss4g2009, the GeoExt community decided to allow developers to provide additional functionality and UI components built on top of GeoExt. This can be done through the GeoExt ux.
The first GeoExt ux is a GeoNames search that can easily be integrated in your applications.
See the demo here and the description here.

The GeoExt community is proud to announce the release of GeoExt 0.6, the second official GeoExt release.

This release closes 51 outstanding tickets, including 34 new features or enhancements and 17 bug fixes.

We invite you to try out GeoExt 0.6 in your applications. Please
download the archive, unzip it to the root of your GeoExt powered application, and include the following script tag in your html:

    <script src="/GeoExt/script/GeoExt.js"></script>

As always, the source is available via subversion. Please report any issues you find with the release on our issue tracker.

The 0.6 release comes with a number of great new features, the full list
of which can be found in the release notes. Some of the highlights include:

• Solid layer node and container enhancements and a new layer node type.
• A feature selection model for synchronizing selected rows in a grid
  and features in a layer.
• New data components: WFS capabilities reader & store; feature
  attributes reader & store; WMS DescribeLayer reader and store; and a Web
  Map Context reader.
• Popups can now hang outside your map viewport!

You should be able to upgrade from GeoExt 0.5 without any issues. To
take advantage of all the new features in this release, you’ll need a
nightly build of OpenLayers. See the release notes for specific
features that require more than OpenLayers 2.8.

We look forward to your feedback on this release.

Probably not. I will try in this blog to provide hints which will help to make your web mapping site terribly fast.

Cache all what you can

On the data side, generate the tiles and let them serve through Apache. For example, if they are served through mod_wsgi, we generally observe a 10% to 20% performance loss.
For the tile generation, one key point is to generate only the needed tiles. For a vector layer, a feature aware tile generation avoids to fill the disks with transparent tiles I’ll make a blog soon to describe the recent developments made in TileCache which solve this problem.
With optipng or jpegoptim, it is possible to reduce the size of the tiles.
It is also important to configure correctly the expires_header. Typically, in pylons, you can set a cache_max_age parameter.
For large sites, it is also recommended to use a proxy (Squid, Varnish) which will cache the content of the application and will be able to deliver directly this content.

Minify and merge your javascripts

Usually, several javascript libraries are used in one website. The jsbuild tool, for example, allows you to minify and concatenate scripts from JavaScript libraries.
It makes also sense to concatenate the css files and use sprites to deliver images.

Compress content with gzip

In order to reduce the amount of data transferred over the network, it is possible to compress it with gzip. In pylons, you can set that quite easily in the ini file (filter-with = gzip). Apache used the mod_deflate mode to do that.

All these points provide performance improvement and therefore a better user experience. But all these points are not sufficient if the application is not made to be fast. Here some example of bottleneck:
- If you query a database and forget to create the correct indices, the query will be slow and all the applications will be slow. And in general, avoid complex queries in database. In certain circumstances, it makes sense to denormalize the database model in order to reach top performance.
- Large XML contents are difficult to parse with javascript, prefer json/GeoJson format to transfer content.
- If your application has a large number of layers, merge them on the server side and not on the client side.
- The best thing that a browser can do is presenting HTML code. It makes sense to prepare the information on the server side (templating) instead of treating it on the client side.

I propably missed some aspects, so don’t hesitate to provide your tricks.