Chapter 5. Interacting with Third Party APIs
Web maps are very popular today, and are growing in popularity. After Google Maps was introduced, there was an explosion of interactive web maps. Google provides an API to interface with its mapping service, as do others now, and OpenLayers work well with most of them. Not only can we use these third party APIs with OpenLayers, we can also 'mashup' other layers on top of them.
In this chapter, we're going to learn:
Concept of third party mapping APIs
Using the layer classes for third party APIs: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
How to use OpenStreetMap
Working with Spherical Mercator
Combining different layer classes
