What does it mean to deploy an OpenLayers (or any other) application? Basically, deploying something means that we're switching from a development mode to a production mode; we're releasing something for the rest of the world to see.

The production application should be as fast and bug free as possible. Because we want the production version to be accessed as quickly as possible, this will often include removing things we used in the development environment and tweaking the production environment to better handle a lot of users. It also means using files that are as small in size as possible. One of the first things we should do to deploy our application is to use the OpenLayers build script to create a library file which is much smaller in file size.