OpenLayers

OpenLayers

Original author(s)	MetaCarta
Developer(s)	The OpenLayers Dev Team
Initial release	June 26, 2006 (2006-06-26)
Stable release	2.11 / September 11, 2011; 2 months ago (2011-09-11)
Written in	JavaScript
Platform	Web browser
Type	Web mapping
License	FreeBSD
Website	http://www.openlayers.org/

OpenLayers is an open source (provided under a modified BSD license) JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and Bing Maps. The library includes components from the Rico JavaScript library and the Prototype JavaScript Framework.

OpenLayers is used by OpenStreetMap project for its "Slippy Map" map interface.

Features

OpenLayers can communicate through several protocols

OpenLayer supports GeoRSS, KML, GML, and GeoJSON and map data from any source using OGC-standards as Web Map Service or Web Feature Service:

• Software:
  • UMN MapServer
  • MapGuide Open Source
  • GeoServer
  • ArcGIS Server
  • ka-Map

• SAAS:
  • Google Maps
  • OpenStreetMap
  • Virtual Earth
  • Yahoo! Maps
  • World Wind servers

History

OpenLayers was created by MetaCarta after the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference^[1] of June 29-30, 2005,^[2] and released as open-source software before the Where 2.0 conference of June 13-14, 2006, by MetaCarta Labs. MetaCarta maintains an active role in supporting and managing the project. Two other open-source mapping tools released by MetaCarta are FeatureServer and TileCache. Since November 2007 OpenLayers is an Open Source Geospatial Foundation project^[3].

Notes

1. ^ History - OpenLayers - Trac
2. ^ conferences.oreilly.com - O'Reilly Conferences - Money:Tech, Tools of Change, ETech, GSP West, MySQL Conf, Web 2.0 Expo SF, Where 2.0, RailsConf, GSP East, Velocity, Ubuntu Li...
3. ^ OSGeo announce

External links

• OpenLayers Official Site
• OpenLayers Discussion Forum
• OpenLayers Roadmap