OpenLayers 2.6 has been released.
- Integration of the CloudAmber "Google Like" popups for advanced visual display of information in popups
- Resulting improvements throughout all popup code, including autosizing popups to the content they contain.
- Improved panning of commercial layers like Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps
- Animated panning of the map, using OpenLayers.Tween support
- Layer Image transitions, for keeping images visible when zooming to allow smoother transitions
- Client side reprojection support using built in transformations for spherical mercator, or the proj4js library for other projections.
- Support for reprojecting vector data layers
- Support for reprojecting user-facing controls like mouseposition
- Support for programatically reprojecting points and geometries
- Improved OpenLayers Styling, including:
- OpenLayers.Style, OpenLayers.StyleMap, OpenLayers.Rule support for improved feature-attribute based styling
- SLD read/write support
- Support for reading and writing multiple versions of WMC.
- Improved KML support, including KML styling support.
- Improved GeoRSS Format support, including GeoRSS GML read support.
- New ScaleLine Control for displaying visual scale
- New NavigationHistory control for map history navigation
- Localization/Better Internationalization support
- Layer support for MapGuide Open Source
- A number of new / improved handlers to make handling user interactions easier
I played with OpenLayers. It looks really cool, a lot of functionality, but it seems to me bit heavy. Also lack of smooth zooming.
So I ended up writing my own multilayer tile manager for the WIKISKY project: http://server1.wikisky.org/index2.jsp?img_source=DSS2&object=Lace-work+nebula
I'm still chasing oneone annoying bug - image sometimes shifted while smoothly zooming and it's not integrated into the main project - just few test buttons.