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

Adding features from a WFS server


The Web Feature Service (WFS) is an OGC standard, which provides independent platform calls to request geographical features to a server. In practice, it means a client makes a HTTP request to a server that implements the WFS standard and gets a set of features in the GML (Geographic Markup Language, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language) format.

Note

A nice introduction to WFS can be found in the tutorial about WFS available at https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog585/book/export/html/1724. If you want to learn more about this, there is a complete specification on the OGC site http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wfs.

From the OpenLayers point of view, the WFS is nothing more than another data source we can read to fill a vector layer.

Before continuing, there is an important point to take into account. Most of the requests made by OpenLayers when data is loaded, say GML, KML, or GeoRSS files, are made asynchronously through the helper...