Fossgis: new openlayers features - Marc Jansen¶

Tags: fossgis, geo

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2017 fossgis conference).

See this morning’s summary for a quick intro on what openlayers is. The current talk is about the latest features and about the future.

New: version 4.0.1. 4? It is not a complete rewrite. It is not a massive break of API compatibility, but there have been a few changes, therefore (“semantic versioning”) a new major number was necessary.

• One important upcoming change: https://npmjs.com/package/ol. ES6/ES2015. In beta status. Support for installing/downloading openlayers via npm. You can select specifically the features you need. After a build, you get a minimized optimalized version. A minimal version can be 32kb!

• Vectorlayers: you can specify whether your vector layer areas overlap or not. If not, you can get a nice speed increase.

• Filtering/clipping: feature info requests and wms requests and so can be limited to within a certain area. That also can give you a big speed increase.

• RotateWithView: for vector layers, whether the labels should rotate with their area or whether they should stay “straight up” with regard to the window.

Future improvements:

• Even easier reusability, for instance by using the ES6/ES2015 modules.

• Easier participation in the project.

• He hopes for even more OpenGL performance.

Photo explanation: just a nice unrelated picture from the recent beautiful ‘on traxs’ model railway exibition (see video )