By now, we've covered all the parts of OpenLayers that are essential for making our own web map application. So far, we've been focusing on how to use the various different parts of OpenLayers. In this chapter, we'll put together those pieces that we've learned and demonstrate how to create an actual web map application with OpenLayers.
While we won't be introducing many new things in this chapter, we will put them together in ways we haven't before. Throughout this chapter, we'll:
In this chapter, we'll be developing a web map application that loads in data from a third-party source (Flickr). The examples have been structured with iterative development in mind. What this means is that you start small and make many changes, gradually building up your web map from nothing into something useful. Iterative development is an important, popular, and effective way to develop applications. The core idea is that you create something simple, get it working, and then improve it. You can figure out more quickly what does and doesn't work by improving on, and learning from, the previous iterations.
Another strategy we'll make use of is modular programming. What this means, essentially, is that we try to keep things as discrete (or modular) as possible. By doing so, once we know a component works, we don't have to worry about it later.