Rich vector editing with a variety of persistence mechanisms (WFS-T, Context, KML, JSON, MapFish) is one of the strengths of OpenLayers. This work item involves exposing the OpenLayers editing functionality and creating modular tools in GeoExt. Of particular interest is GUI's for attribute editing, so users can easily change the properties of the features in addition to the geometry.
The basic tools needed for an editing toolbar are components to insert, update and delete features. There also needs to be a way to determine if you want to add points, lines or polygons, and optionally which layer to add it to. The other main component needed for the basics is a mechanism for editing attributes, be it from within a pop-up or on a grid elsewhere in the application.
Behind the scenes we need to make sure that saves get persisted properly. Many people want to use different backend storage mechanisms, like WFS-T, AtomPub, or saving features directly out as GeoJSON, GML, or KML. There is also interest in offline editing using HTML 5 or Gears and then syncing back up when online. The GeoExt components should make it easy for the programmer (and eventually even the user) to select different storage mechanisms.
Past the editing toolbar basics, it should be easy to incorporate even richer editing capabilities, like the Snapping and Splitting components that Tim Schaub recently did for a client. Along those lines there are things like the Shared Polygon Boundary Edit Tool, the COGO Geometry Creator and the Build Polygon Tool which all give even richer editing capabilities to OpenLayers and GeoExt.
Funding
This roadmap item was funded by GEM, TIKE, and OpenGeo. Thank you!
These features were added to OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 2.4.0
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Other Roadmap Items
Web users especially require a flexible library of images for their map styles. We fill this need with an improved Image Manager for our Styler application.
Versioned Editing Toolbar and Components
There have been several applications making use of the WFS-V 'versioning' protocol of GeoServer, to do operations like History, Diff and Rollback in addition to the standard editing. These should have default components in GeoExt so people can easily add rich versioning capabilities to their applications
GeoExt should provide components that make it easy to export the current map to a variety of formats. Foremost among these is embedding the current view to a webpage or blog. Past that it would be great to export in a variety of formats, like Google Earth, PDF, or as another GeoExt application with alternate controls.