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

Adding WMS layer


Web Map Service (WMS),is a standard developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) implemented by many geospatial servers, among which we can find the free and open source projects GeoServer (http://geoserver.org) and MapServer (http://mapserver.org). More information on WMS can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Map_Service.

As a very basic summary, you can understand a WMS server as a normal HTTP web server that accepts request with some GIS-related parameters (such as projection, bounding box, and so on) and returns a map similar to the following screenshot:

Note

We are going to work with remote WMS servers, so it is not necessary you have one installed. As an advise, note that we are not responsible for these servers and that they may have problems, or are not available when you read this section.

Any other WMS server can be used, but the URL and layer name must be known.

How to do it...

To add a WMS layer, perform the following steps:

  1. Create an HTML file and...