Saturday morning, the day the conference visitor couldn’t decide, but had to.

Status reports from the OpenLayers, Leaflet, PostGIS, MapServer, MapProxy, etc. etc. etc. projects were on the agenda. The parallel scheduling of the presentations on the status of the OpenLayers 3” href=”http://ol3js.org/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>OpenLayers 3 and Leaflet projects can certainly be described as somewhat unfortunate.

The new MapServer functions, which are available from version 6.4, are interesting. Of particular note are the extended labeling options, which are to be completely revised again for the upcoming version 7, the new options for displaying complex symbols, and the ability to outsource expressions into list elements, which should lead to significant streamlining of spaghetti mapfiles.

With the ScribeUI project, an interface for creating and managing mapfiles has finally been provided. In addition, a new API was presented that allows the creation and expansion of MapServer services via remote access. The API covers approximately the same functions that GeoServer already has. The days of text-based parsing of mapfiles should therefore be a thing of the past.

Chris Helm concluded with a report on a wide range of possibilities from the world of “GIS and JavaScript”. Among other things, libraries such as shapely, topoJS, JSTS, D3 and many others were mentioned. In particular, the possibilities offered by vector tiles (vector data delivered to the browser in tiles) were discussed. We are convinced that the processing of vector data directly in the browser will revolutionize the already seemingly limitless possibilities of web mapping.

A somewhat excessive thank-you orgy from a personal point of view, including the election of countless FOSS4G-Heroes, ended the conference and passed the baton on to Portland 2014, where the next FOSS4G will take place.