Comparing GeoExt, MapQuery and Legato from a technical and collaborative point of view

Since joining the FOSS4G conference 2007 in Vicrtoria, Canada I felt, that OpenLayers is the coming "star" on the “OpenSource webbased GIS software-sky“. Since them we started running numerous projects with OpenLayers as the core-mapping component in our company. But with the upcoming complexity of the projects, there was a strong need for a more powerful client. So we started a piece of software, that we called our "core", which was a kind of marriage between OpenLayers, XML-configuration and the JQuery library.

Now, four years later there are numerous OpenSource projects with OpenLayers as the mapping component together with a powerful Javascript-library.

The talk will introduce and compare the mapping toolkits GeoEXt, MapQuery and Legato, which all use OpenLayers as their mapping-component, Although the named toolkits are different in their architecture, they have the same focus we had: The need for a more powerful webmapping client with smooth functionality. GeoExt uses ExtJs as library, MapQuery is based on the Javascript library JQuery and Legato is mor focussed on configuring OpenLayers via XML, but also delivers extensions such as a layertree for example. Beside the technical view I will also try to illuminate the state of the projects in the community and the interactions between the mapping-toolkit library and the OpenLayers project.

Of course a comparison must be kind of "subjective" but the talk tries to be as uncommitted as possilbe. Regarding the jungle of Fossgis projects it is always difficult to find out, which piece of software maybe the best for a particular project. This talk will try to give some benchmark data to hit the spot.