Book Image

Mastering OpenLayers 3

By : Gábor Farkas
Book Image

Mastering OpenLayers 3

By: Gábor Farkas

Overview of this book

OpenLayers 3 allows you to create stunning web mapping and WebGIS applications. It uses modern, cutting edge browser technologies. It is written with Closure Library, enabling you to build browser-independent applications without painful debugging ceremonies, which even have some limited fallback options for older browsers. With this guide, you will be introduced to the world of advanced web mapping and WebGIS. First, you will be introduced to the advanced features and functionalities available in OpenLayers 3. Next, you will be taken through the key points of creating custom applications with OpenLayers 3. You will then learn how to create the web mapping application of yours (or your company's) dream with this open source, expense-free, yet very powerful library. We’ll also show you how to make amazing looking thematic maps and create great effects with canvas manipulation. By the end of this book, you will have a strong command of web mapping and will be well on your way to creating amazing applications using OpenLayers 3.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering OpenLayers 3
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Compiling OpenLayers 3


Now that we have resolved every dependency, let's build some versions of the library. First, we will build the minified and debug versions of the library just to see whether everything works fine. In the tasks folder, we can see a bunch of JavaScript files used in various stages of development. There are some test programs, serve commands, and the command that we will use to compile the library: build.js. This program requires two parameters to run. The first is a configuration file, while the second is the name of the result.

As the Closure Compiler is a quite complex library built in Java and Python, OpenLayers 3's developers created some utilities to make our lives easier. With build.js, we do not have to directly parameterize the Closure Compiler, we just have to write a configuration file in the JSON format. The program reads our configuration file and writes every exportable symbol (constructor, method, and so on) from the src folder to a file named info.json...