[Marble-devel] RFC: Layer Management Class, Marble Qt-style Painter API, DGML 2.0

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi Everybody, 

With Marble 0.6 we'd like to introduce several aspects which will make it 
easier to extend Marble further and to make it more flexible. Additionally it 
will give 3rd party developers a nice API to draw their own features in 
Marble and to create their own plugins:

1.) A Layer Management Class which allows for Qt-Plugins to be used for 
Layers.

2.) A Qt-style API which will allow you to paint geographic features on the 
MarbleWidget with ease.

3.) A revised much more sophisticated version of our map storage format, 
called DGML. DGML is basically the integrative file format that takes KML. 
GPX and possibly other formats and merges their contents into Marble's map. 
Additionally DGML and the other formats are meant to get parsed by the 
QXmlStreamReader based geodata library. 

Currently we are still at planning stage - well, actually we have started with 
some aspects already, like the legend section. But there's a lot of work 
ahead.

If you are using Marble or the MarbleWidget to create your own maps then it 
would be nice if you could have a look at our proposal. If you feel that 
something is missing or wrong, please speak up.

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdeedu/marble/docs/layermanagement.txt?revision=766731&view=markup

Given that implementing the whole spec is expected to be quite some work, we'd 
be happy about anyone volunteering to help out. Much of the work doesn't 
require math skills or a deep understanding of Marble code. Most of it just 
requires some experience with Qt.

-- 
 Torsten Rahn

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