OpenLayers

OpenLayers Resources

  • OpenLayers Community Site
  • OpenLayers Issue Tracker
  • OpenLayers Source Code
  • OpenLayers Documentation
  • OpenLayers Workshop
  • OpenLayers Chat Room

OpenGeo Services

OpenGeo offers OpenLayers training, including introductory and advanced sessions, as well as OpenLayers core development to add new features to the project.

Our OpenLayers Team

Andreas Hocevar

Andreas is an active OpenLayers and GeoExt steering committee member and committer. He has been working in geospatial for almost 20 years, and is a frequent teacher and speaker.

Sam Smith

Samuel has worn multiple hats during his 12-year affair with spatial technologies: user, print cartographer, web-mapper, integrator, scripter/programmer, trainer, analyst, manager.

David Winslow

David Winslow is Technical Lead of the GeoNode team. As a committer on GeoTools, GeoServer, and GeoExt, as well as a contributor to OpenLayers, his expertise covers the entire OpenGeo Stack.

About OpenLayers

OpenLayers

OpenLayers is a JavaScript library for displaying maps in your browser. Highly extensible, it serves as the foundation of all of our web mapping interfaces. OpenLayers accesses data through industry standards, leaving it free of server-side dependencies. It is released under a BSD-style license.

  • Overlay multiple standards-compliant map layers into a single application
  • Displays tiles/images from WMS, WMTS, TMS, WMS-C, WMTS, Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yahoo Maps, OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS
  • Vector feature rendering and styling with support for KML, GeoJSON, WKT, GML, WFS, GeoRSS
  • Web-based editing, including feature snapping and splitting, via WFS-Transactional (WFS-T) leveraging SVG or VML
  • Pluggable with any JavaScript toolkit (JQuery, Ext, Dojo, MooTools)
  • Client side map reprojection
  • Feature clustering and paging

OpenLayers Applications

OpenLayers provides a powerful foundation for web mapping applications like the ones below:

  • Styler: An interactive styling application for geospatial data.
  • Community Almanac: A collaborative community building and story telling application developed for the Orton Foundation.
  • GeoView: A tool for browsing geospatial data on the web.
  • Vespucci: A collaborative mapping tool that takes advantage of GeoServer's versioning capability.
  • NYC Building Editor: A simple demo of GeoServer's versioning ability.

OpenLayers @ OpenGeo

Recent Contributions

OpenGeo funds ongoing development of OpenLayers as part of our larger mission to make public geodata more accessible and usable to civil society. Recent contributions include:

  • Major improvements to vector rendering and especially the VML renderer.
  • Adding point symbol rotation, support for well known symbols and dashed/dotted lines and borders to the SLD support.

Core Development Roadmap

COGO Geometry Creator

Creating new geometry from COGO directions is a common use case for web editing tools in county and municipal jurisdictions. This work item will take in COGO directions and return a feature suitable for rendering on the map, sending back to the server, etc.

Full Support of Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) specification

OpenLayers has basic support of the SLD specification of the OGC, but there are a number of more advanced options that it does not support. Among those are multiple symbolizers per rule and advanced labeling and rendering options. Another improvement needed for the web environment is to to support POST requests for WMS/Image layers to overcome the url length limitation (e.g. when using client defined SLD for rendering).

Cascadenik CSS-like language

Support Cascadenik, a way to style maps in using a syntax similar to CSS, as a way to persist and create OpenLayers style objects. Makes cartography easy for web designers.

More development items...