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

Introduction


OpenLayers is a big and complex framework. There is no other option available for a framework that allows working with many GIS standards, reading from many different data sources, rendering on different browser technologies, and so on. This power comes with a price.

The implementation of OpenLayers tries to have as less dependencies on external libraries as possible. This means, OpenLayers requires implementing many features that we can find in other projects: DOM elements' manipulation, AJAX requests, and so on.

This chapter shows some of these features, in addition to other possible common needs we can require in our day-to-day work that are not explained in other chapters, such as creation of layer animations or the implementation of custom controls. Because of this, the chapter is more suited for more experienced JavaScript programmers.