Book Image

OpenLayers Cookbook

Book Image

OpenLayers Cookbook

Overview of this book

Data visualization and analysis has become an important task for many companies. Understanding the basic concepts of GIS and knowing how to visualize data on a map is a required ability for many professionals today. OpenLayers is a JavaScript library to load, display, and render maps from multiple sources on web pages."OpenLayers Cookbook" teaches how to work with OpenLayers, one of the most important and complete open source JavaScript libraries.Through an extensive set of recipes, this book shows how to work with the main concepts required to build a GIS web applicationñ maps, raster and vector layers, styling, theming, and so on."OpenLayers Cookbook" includes problem solving and how-to recipes for the most common and important tasks. A wide range of topics are covered.The range of recipes includes: creating basic maps, working with raster and vector layers, understanding events and working with main controls, reading features from different data sources, styling features, and understanding the underlying architecture."OpenLayers Cookbook" describes solutions and optimizations to problems commonly found.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenLayers Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using WMS with single tile mode


Web Map Service (WMS) is a protocol to serve georeferenced map images.

The basic idea is that, given a bounding box and some other parameters, such as a layer name, the client makes an HTTP request to the WMS server, which computes and returns an image with all the data for the specified layers and within the specified bounding box.

In OpenLayers, when you add a WMS layer to your map, the OpenLayers.Layer.WMS instance is provided with some parameters, such as resolutions and tile size. The WMS server computes the right number of tiles for each zoom level and divides the layer in that number of tiles.

This way, when you add a WMS layer to the map, there is not only one request to the server, but one by each tile that forms the current zoom level.

Note

Dividing the WMS layer in tiles can be better from the server-side point of view when it is configured with a cache system. This way tiles are generated once and served many times.

If you have more than one web mapping...