Instant OpenLayers Starter

Web Mapping made simple and fast!

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Visualize your geographical data
• Integrate with third party map services to create mash-ups
• Stylize and interact with your maps

In Detail

OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript web mapping library distinguished from other alternatives, like Leaflet or Google Maps APIs, because of its huge set of components. Having being on the scene for a long time, users can benefit from a large set of resources and documentations, and a wide and actively supportive community.

Instant OpenLayers Starter gives you the possibility to produce your first "real" web map without being an experienced programmer or a GIS specialist. It provides you with an overview of the most popular vector and raster data formats used to share spatial information on the Web. By the end of the book you will be able to amaze your boss with a brand new web map and a bag of skills to give life to your geodata.

Instant OpenLayers Starter guides you through a fast and effective journey of web mapping, to discover how easy it is to put maps in your web projects, from simple base maps to interactive geo mash-ups, Google Maps, OpenStreetmap, GeoRSS, Panoramio, and your data. Starting with a lot of geo-information sources and a powerful library, we will explore how to manage maps inside web pages using basic third-party base maps to the overlay of re-projected vector data, going through styling thematic data and data interaction.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn OpenLayers and what you can expect by using it
• Install and configure a simple web environment to publish your maps
• Use the OpenLayers library in your web projects
• Create a simple web map in no more than a dozen lines of JavaScript code
• Add layers from a variety of different sources, local and remote
• Activate and deactivate layers using scale dependency
• Show a popup with information contained in your spatial data
• Combine styling properties, data retrieving, and representation strategies to make your web maps responsive and readable

Approach

Get to grips with a new technology, understand what it is and what it can do for you, and then get to work with the most important features and tasks.A quick and simple Starter to working with the OpenLayers JavaScript library architecture, helping you become productive with it in a very short time.

Who this book is written for

Instant OpenLayers Starter is a book for web designers or GIS specialists with a basic knowledge of JavaScript, for learning how to create simple, embedded, and basic maps, or to build complex data analysis and data management RIAs.