The OpenLayers website

The website for OpenLayers is located at http://openlayers.org/. To begin, we need to download a copy of OpenLayers (or, we can directly link to the library—but we'll download a local copy). You can download the compressed library as either a .tar.gz or .zip, but both contain the same files.

Let's go over the links:

• Link to the hosted version: If you do not want to actually download OpenLayers, you can instead link to the OpenLayers library by adding this script URL to your site in a <script> tag.

• 2.10 (Stable) .tar.gz or .zip: This should show the latest stable release (2.10 at the time of writing). You can download it as either a tar.gz or .zip; if you are unsure of which to get, you should download the .zip version.

• 2.10 Release Notes: This highlights things that have changed, bugs that have been fixed, etc.

• Class documentation, more documentation: These are links to the API documentation, which we will make heavy use of throughout the book. I recommend opening it up and keeping it up while working through the examples.

• See examples...: OpenLayers provides a rich array of examples demonstrating features of the library; if you're ever stuck or looking for a good example—go here.