Terria is getting another piston — 8.0.0 of TerriaJS

Published in

Terria

2 min readAug 31, 2020

We are on the cusp of our next major version update to version 8 of Terria, and the team is working tirelessly to make upgrading from v7 as seamless as possible. The key date we have earmarked for this celebratory time is December 14th 2020. You can keep using v7 maps after then if you choose to, this is simply a date after which we think we can confidently say that for the vast majority of cases, TerriaJS will be in a state where you can upgrade to it without concern.

Catalog Converter

V8 of Terria has some slightly different conventions to what a catalog JSON looks like. Given that, we wanted to make sure there was an easily accessible tool to convert an existing v7 catalog over for use in v8. There are some properties that are not supported yet, and any occurrences of those will show up in the tool when you attempt to convert. This will be updated as we improve catalog support in v8.

https://catalog-converter.terria.io/

The code for the converter itself lives here.

The code for the UI above lives here.

Deprecations

There are a few features in v7 that we are considering deprecating, we’ll have more on this in the near future — some of these include:

ABS ITT
Socrata(?)
GPX(?)
WMS region mapping

Reach out to us if you are using these, we only know about the things we have seen.

Catalog Documentation

This is WIP and we will provide an update when this is published — the PR can be tracked here and the issue relating to this here.

Can I use v8 today?

Yes you can. However, we would not recommend it right now if you have an existing production v7 map, the key reason being that your old share and story links will not work in v8 yet. If that isn’t something you need to consider, have a look through https://github.com/TerriaJS/terriajs/milestone/40 to see if there are any show stoppers for your specific use case.

What will happen to v7?

We’re not going to delete v7, your existing maps will still work.

Are there any examples of v8 Terria instances out there?

Yes — our focus for v8 has been on the NSW Spatial Digital Twin and the QLD Spatial Digital Twin, which are both running in production. Otherwise, there’s always the latest development branch of v8 Terria on http://ci.terria.io/next/

We aim to have more details leading up to December, including a migration guide and further decisions on the deprecations. We have a gitter chat here and Google Group here to keep the conversation going. Hope to have another update soon, and thanks for the continued support!