History of Mapbender
From MapbenderWiki
This article gives an overview of the history of the project Mapbender. See the page History for a detailed development history of the software.
To appreciate the value and relevance of a Free and Open Source Software project it is helpful to know where it comes from, who is working on it and who uses it.
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How it began
At the end of the last millennium the company CCGIS (now WhereGroup) based in Germany implemented a first web map application in PHP and JavaScript to display the emerging OGC WMS standards. The software was released in 2001 and several German municipal administrations started to use it. The first large installation was the spatial data infrastructure of the city of Bonn, serving 200 thematic map layers to 400 users through dozens of customized applications. In 2003, several important changes occurred in the project. The software was completely redesigned with two goals in mind. First, reduce the complexity of the relation- ship of services, applications, user interface elements and user management. Second, provide administration interfaces and a data model that allows users to manage every aspect of the software via web interfaces. Mapbender was released under the Free Software license GNU GPL. The new name of the project was changed to Mapbender.
The Name of the Project
The name Mapbender relates to the Futurama character, Bender, an alcoholic, kleptomaniac steel beam bending robot with absolute- ly no charm whatsoever. This pretty much characterizes the Mapbender software of the early days. It was busy collecting all maps it could lay its fingers on and “bent” them to fit them into its round belly. The missing charm is still visible in some of the user interfaces - one can tell that they were implemented by developers and not designers. Originally these applications were only meant to be a collection of examples and not for use in a productive day to day context.
Adopting a Free Software license and going Open Source
Release of Mapbender under the GNU GPL licenses as Free Software took place in 2003 and users and developers started to adopt the new open development philosophy. In 2004, the software became part of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of North Rhine- Westphalia [4] and was used by several counties and municipalities as their web based mapping environment. The first official demo server was put into operation and is still in operation within the OSGeo infrastructure [5]. Also in 2004, the website and documentation were migrated to a public Wiki as a common technical platform where, to ensure quality, editors need to apply for a user account and authentication.
Growing the Community
The first user conference took place in Bonn in April 2005 with attendees coming from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The next Mapbender meetings took place as part of larger events like the annual German language FOSSGIS [6], the international FOSS4G conferences [7], the GIS industry trade fair INTERGEO and the international convention AGIT [8].
Professionalizing Development
Mapbender was one of eight initial projects of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), founded in February 2006. In the following six months, Mapbender went through the incubation process of the OSGeo under scrutiny of the Incubation Committee and the help of mentor Paul Spencer [9]. During incubation, several license issues were identified and resolved, the code was cleaned, copyright ambiguities were resolved, and the source code repository, development infrastructure and mailing lists were migrated to OSGeo. On 19 July 2006, Mapbender was the first project to officially graduate from OSGeo Incubation. The current stable version 2.4.4 of the software was released on 21 December 2007. The development team has grown to nine active contributors from different organizations and backgrounds.
References
[1] http://www.osgeo.org/mapserver [2] http://www.geoserver.org [3] http://openlayers.org [4] http://www.gdi-nrw.org [5] http://mapbender.telascience.org [6] http://www.fossgis.de [7] http://www.foss4g2006.org [8] http://www.agit.at [9] http://www.osgoe.org/paul_spencer
