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 Google Maps imagery


Google Maps is probably the most known web map application around the world. Their imageries, in the way of tiled layers, are well known by people; they are accustomed to their layer style and because of this you may be interested in using them in your own web mapping project.

OpenLayers counts with the OpenLayers.Layer.Google class, which is in fact a wrapper code around the Google Maps API, that allows us to use the Google Maps tiles in a homogeneous way within the OpenLayers API.

Note

Do not confuse Google Maps API with the Google Maps imagery. Google Maps API is a bunch of JavaScript code, which is free to use, while the access to the Google Maps imagery has some usage restrictions and, depending on the number of hits, will be subject to some payments.

How to do it...

To use Google Maps imagery, perform the following steps:

  1. Create an HTML file and add the OpenLayers dependencies.

  2. Include the Google Maps API as follows:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps...