Changing the zoom effect

The panning and zoom effects are very important actions related to the user navigation experience.

In Chapter 1, Web Mapping Basics, the recipe Moving around the map view shows how you can control and create the way the map can be panned.

In the same way you can control the transition effect between two zoom levels on the layers.

The OpenLayers.Layer class has a transitionEffect property, which determines the effect applied to the layer when the zoom level is changed. For the moment only two values are allowed: null and resize.

The null value means no transition effect will be applied, because when you change the zoom level you probably see how the layer disappears until the tiles at the new zoom level are loaded.

With the resize value when we zoom into a level, the current tiles are resized, adapting to the new zoom, until the tiles at the new level are loaded in background. This way images are always visible and we avoid the ugly effect of seeing a blank map for...