Book Image

OpenLayers 3: Beginner's Guide

By : Thomas Gratier, Paul Spencer, Erik Hazzard
Book Image

OpenLayers 3: Beginner's Guide

By: Thomas Gratier, Paul Spencer, Erik Hazzard

Overview of this book

<p>This book is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with all the information you need to get started with mapping using the OpenLayers 3 library.</p> <p>The book starts off by showing you how to create a simple map. Through the course of the book, we will review each component needed to make a map in OpenLayers 3, and you will end up with a full-fledged web map application. You will learn the key role of each OpenLayers 3 component in making a map, and important mapping principles such as projections and layers. You will create your own data files and connect to backend servers for mapping. A key part of this book will also be dedicated to building a mapping application for mobile devices and its specific components.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
OpenLayers 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – rendering a masterpiece


Let's modify our example and add a renderer option to see what happens:

  1. Open the example in your web browser. Right-click on the map and select Inspect Element to open the Web Inspector and see what OpenLayers creates in the web page to display the map.

  2. You should see something like the following screenshot:

    The inspector is highlighting the HTML element used to render the map. In this case, that element is the <canvas> element. This element is used for both the WebGL and Canvas renderers. Let's see what happens when we change the renderer.

  3. Edit the example and change the map object constructor to use the DOM renderer, like this:

    var map = new ol.Map({
     target: 'map',
     view: view,
 
     layers: [layer],
     renderer: 'dom'
    });
  4. Save this and load it in your web browser. Right-click on the map and select Inspect Element to open the Web Inspector and see what has changed:

What just happened?

Now, we see a lot of <img> elements. By choosing the DOM renderer...