Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It uses the AGG library or Cairo library and offers world class anti-aliasing rendering with subpixel accuracy for geographic data. It is written from scratch in modern C++ and doesn't suffer from design decisions made a decade ago. When it comes to handling common software tasks such as memory management, filesystem access, regular expressions, parsing and so on, Mapnik doesn't re-invent the wheel, but utilizes best of breed industry standard libraries from http://boost.org.
Mapnik was started in a warm June afternoon in 2005 by Artem Pavlenko. First version was released in ...
Current version is 0.7.1 available for download at http://mapnik.org/download/.
Mapnik community is organized around main site http://mapnik.org and development site http://trac.mapnik.org on which you can find latest news about Mapnik and its development. Development site is organized like a wiki which contains a lot of useful information, and you can freely contribute if you sign up.
Also you can ask questions on mailing lists mapnik-users and if you want to help developing Mapnik check out mapnik-devel. On this links you will also find mailing list archive, which you should check before asking your question. You can follow mailing lists on Nabble.
If you like more direct communication you can find us on #mapnik at irc.freenode.net, feel free to drop in with your question anytime.
Mapnik is a cross platform toolkit that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux (since release 0.4). Users commonly run Mapnik on Mac >=10.4.x (both intel and PPC), as well as Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos, OpenSuse, and FreeBSD.
Mapnik uses a plugin architecture to read different datasources. Current plugins which are considered stable, and built by default, are:
- shape - support for accessing ESRI Shape files
- postgis - support for accessing geospatial data through PostGIS, the spatial database extension for PostgreSQL
- raster - stripped or tiled raster TIFF image dataset support
Other plugins are not unstable but as they were added later in development and there could still be some issues:
- gdal - support for GDAL datasets
- ogr - support for OGR datasets
- osm - support reading OpenStreetMap XML dataset
- sqlite - support for SQLite / Spatialite sql vector format
- occi - support for oracle spatial 10g (versions 10.2.0.x) sql vector format
- kismet - support for kismet GPS support shows little WLAN nodes on the map
- rasterlite - support for Rasterlite sqlite raster with wavelet compression
More data access plug-ins will be available in the future. If you cannot wait and/or like coding in C++, why not write your own data access plug-in?
Large number of developers and contributors are actively developing mapnik2 which will become 0.8.0. Also, version 0.7.2 is scheduled to be released shortly.