OpenLayers

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What is OpenLayers?

OpenLayers (http://openlayers.org/) is Javascript code you use on your Web server. You reference it from your own HTML and Javascript based pages, to put maps into your web site.

Docs for programmers: http://openlayers.org/en/latest/doc/

OpenLayers is very stable code. It supports tiled raster and vector layers. It supports editing. It seems to support everything that I want to do.

OpenLayers 6 is coming

Version 6 in beta now. I have started using it so that my project can keep up.

Here are the steps I took to work with the beta, along with the command I used.

1. Download the zip of the beta source code from Github, openlayers/openlayers releases.
2. Unpack it, for example unzip openlayers-6.0.0-beta.11.zip
3. Build it. Chdir into the folder and then npm install && npm run build-package
4. Remove ol 5 from my project to make sure it will use the beta. cd ../ol-react && npm uninstall ol
5. Copy the new package into my project. cd ../ol-react && cp -r ../openlayers/build/ol .
6. Tell npm to use it. npm install ./ol

You can run the OpenLayers samples too. npm start and go to http://localhost:8080/

In my project's home page (example0.js) I added 2 lines of code,

import {VERSION} from 'ol'
.
and added a little bit to the JSX portion.
.
Currently using OpenLayers version {VERSION}

Books

OpenLayers is so popular that there are even books about it! None for version 5 yet that I know of. I removed all the books I had listed here because they were all more than 2 years old. :-) You can look in the History tab if you really want.

The Marin library has ebooks via Safari but they are for version 3.

I bought OpenLayers 3.x Cookbook and I am going through it. Yes.. OL 4.x is out, but the big break was 2->3, 3->4 is a smaller jump and there aren't books on 4 yet. Or 5.

My test samples

live server

Lately I have been working on https://map46.com Sometimes I have http://maps.wildsong.biz/ up on Bellman.

at github

Currently I am using Node.JS and testing on my desktop. You can see code I have running here: https://github.com/brian32768/map46 and https://github.com/brian32768/OpenlayersTests

For the first week I extensively used Microsoft Visual Studio and Parcel. Since then I have learned enough JavaScript that I've just been using Emacs to edit, Parcel to build, and Chrome to test and debug.

That project has samples with OpenLayers 2, 4, and 5 (3 and 4 are the same basically so only one). Because there were BOOKS on 2 and 3 I started there and built samples, got them running and then stepped up.

There is an example using XYZ so that I could test an ESRI tile server.

Now I am now adding a Bootstrap + OpenLayers sample so that I can make something that looks like a real web site.

OpenLayers + ArcGIS REST

https://boundlessgeo.com/2015/12/improving-interoperability-between-openlayers-and-esri-arcgis-restv/

OpenLayers and React

I have a separate page on React.

Three sample projects on Github, all stopped at OpenLayers 3.

This one actually just loads and runs, making me happy. Pirmin Kalberer's OL3-React-Example Works right out of the box.

Richard Hill's ol-react. Took me 1/2 a day to get it to build but there is no example on how to use it. Bad for me, a React newbie.

Allen Kim's react_openlayers