MapGuide tidbits: OpenLayers in relation to Fusion

I'd had been holding off on this particular post for quite some time because what is written below wasn't exactly true or applicable until MapGuide RFC 132 was implemented. Now that the RFC is completed, the time to publish this post is more suitable.

As some of you know, Fusion is built on top of the powerful OpenLayers library.

But what you may not know (and probably want to know) are the specifics.

What version of OpenLayers?

Believe it or not, I myself do not know what version of OpenLayers is currently bundled with the Fusion that comes with MapGuide Open Source 2.5 (or older releases). Our bundled copy in Fusion has the release version number scrubbed out by SVN making it hard to determine the actual version number.

I strongly believe it is OpenLayers 2.10 due to the lack of touch event support.

For the next release of MapGuide Open Source (2.6) the answer will be crystal clear: Fusion will be using OpenLayers 2.12. What OpenLayers 2.12 brings to the table for Fusion will be the topic of another post.

What OpenLayers build profile?

As some of you may know, OpenLayers is not a monolithic library. It can be customized with various build profiles to include/exclude certain parts of the OpenLayers library. What that means in practice is that some parts of the OpenLayers API may not be available to be used in Fusion because we use our own custom build profile for OpenLayers. Our custom build profile is defined in fusion.cfg, there you can see what parts of the OpenLayers API we've included and what parts we've excluded.

Now sadly, the way OpenLayers is set up within the fusion source tree (before RFC 132) is that we are keeping in a "built" version of OpenLayers.js and have customizations done on that one file. This makes customizing your own OpenLayers build for use with Fusion much more harder as our current audit trail of Fusion-specific customizations is very hard to track. This means that customizing your own OpenLayers for Fusion may not be as simple as:

1. Download the OpenLayers zip/tarball
2. Build it with your desired build profile
3. Overwrite Fusion's OpenLayers.js with your built copy.

For the Fusion that will come MapGuide Open Source 2.6, this will be much more clearer. We'll be reserving a section of the Fusion repo, for Fusion-specific customizations to individual js files in OpenLayers such that customizing your own OpenLayers becomes:

1. Download the OpenLayers 2.12 zip/tarball
2. Overlay the directory (where you unzip/untared) with our Fusion-specific modified files
3. Build OpenLayers with your desired build profile
4. Overwrite Fusion's OpenLayers.js with your built copy
5. Re-build and re-minify Fusion with your custom OpenLayers.

This way, the OpenLayers build you customize will retain our Fusion-specific changes where necessary, and allows you to tap into parts of OpenLayers that we may have excluded from our custom build.