OpenLayers 2.4 Release Candidate Announcement

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the first release candidate of OpenLayers 2.4. While the public API maintains backwards compatibility with previous 2.x releases, OpenLayers 2.4 introduces a number of internal changes that are important for developers working inside the OpenLayers library, including:

• Support for rendering vectors on the map, using both SVG and VML (finally!)
• Vector Geometry classes
• New UI Handler classes
• New and improved Control classes, including a generic toolbar class
• Substantial enhancements to existing Layer classes, particularly WFS
• A massive effort to track down and eliminate memory leaks of JavaScript objects and DOM nodes
• Better auto-generated class documentation
• Tons and tons of bug fixes!

As of 2.4-RC1, the OpenLayers 2.4 release closes 106 outstanding tickets, more than any other OpenLayers release to date! For this we are indebted to the many members of the community, as listed in our new  contributor file, who have put their hard work into improving OpenLayers. Please see the release notes for OpenLayers 2.4 and the list of closed tickets for more details.

We invite you to help us test the 2.4 release candidate! To test 2.4 in your applications, include the following tag in your OpenLayers-powered page:

  <script src="http://openlayers.org/api/2.4-rc1/OpenLayers.js"></script>

As always, the source can be had from http://openlayers.org/download/. Bug reports can be filed in Trac, under the 2.4 version and milestone.

We look forward to your feedback!

Regards,

The OpenLayers Team