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

Retrieving remote data with OpenLayers.Request


Data is the basis for a web mapping application. We can add raster or vector layers to the map, which will load images or vector information.

In the case of vector layers, thanks to the OpenLayers.Protocol and OpenLayers.Format subclasses, we can configure the layer to load data from different sources and with different formats.

Anyway, there can be circumstances where we need to request data by ourselves, read the specific format, and add features. We are talking about making asynchronous JavaScript calls.

This recipe shows how we can use the helper class OpenLayers.Request to asynchronously request data from the remote servers.

Here, we are going to request a URL that returns random x and y values that we will process as point features on the map.

Note

OpenLayers is a framework for GIS web developers, so it is designed to be independent from other projects, such as jQuery and Dojo that offer facilities to request remote data and implement its own...