Hi Armin, OpenLayers supports several different layer types. Have a look at the http://dev.openlayers.org/releases/OpenLayers-2.9.1/doc/apidocs/files/OpenLayers-js.html Class Documentation under the Layer section. Depending on the size of your raster layers, you may be able to load them directly as an Image Layer- see http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/image-layer.html http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/image-layer.html . If they are large images, you will probably want to cut them into tiles- see http://www.maptiler.org/ Map Tiler .
The same general rule applies for your vector data. Smaller, less complex datasets may be loaded directly as a vector layer (KML, JSON, GML, Text, etc), while larger datasets will require some server side processing. You could use GeoServer to render your files as WMS overlays in OpenLayers, or you could load the data into a spatial database (PostGIS/MySQL) and write a PHP script to call just the bits you need to fill the map viewport. Hope this helps to get you started... ----- Bryan R. McBride, GISP http://www.bryanmcbride.com bryanmcbride.com -- View this message in context: http://osgeo-org.1803224.n2.nabble.com/First-time-user-of-OpenLayers-FORMAT-of-Layers-tp5109032p5109163.html Sent from the OpenLayers Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/users
