OpenLayers - Agile Geography in a Browser

Presentation | Presented

  • Tim Schaub, The Open Planning Project

OpenLayers has evolved quickly in the last year and a half. With an extremely active community of users and developers, OpenLayers has grown into a robust browser based mapping library. This presentation will cover the basics of building simple applications with OpenLayers and will explore advanced possibilities for including OpenLayers in a more complex web mapping solution.

Topics covered:
- Basic slippy map with WMS and more
- Vector rendering
- Vector editing
- Format juggling
- Best practices for good performance
- more

This year, OpenLayers added support for client-side vector rendering. Given GML via WFS, KML, GeoRSS, or even Well-Known Text, OpenLayers can render points, lines, polygons, and multi-part geometries. The presentation will cover configuration of an application to read from these and more data sources.

In addition, we will cover creation and editing of features through heads-up digitizing. We'll demonstrate how to start from scratch, create new features by drawing in a browser, and post those features to a persistence layer. We'll also demonstrate OpenLayers as a WFS-Transaction client - discussing tips for maintaining good performance in a browser.

Finally, we'll explore newly evolving features and formats - looking ahead at the future of OpenLayers. If you know nothing of OpenLayers, you'll leave this talk with materials to build your own simple web mapping application. For advanced users, we'll expose you to more complex features and describe best practices for developing with OpenLayers.

Supporting Files