Hacker News Reader

OpenLayers 3 dev here.

All these mapping libraries are great.

Google Maps comes with great data. Leaflet has a really nice API. OpenLayers 3 comes with loads of functionality built in.

Please check out our OpenLayers 3 examples at http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/

Interesting ones include:

Full screen rotate and zoom: http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/full-screen-drag-rotate-...

Animation: http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/animation.html

60fps heatmaps: http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/heatmap-earthquakes.html

High quality KML rendering: http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/kml.html

Detailed geometries: http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/igc.html

Canvas effects: http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/layer-spy.html

Canvas, DOM and WebGL renders: http://ol3js.org/en/master/examples/side-by-side.html

Full application with OpenLayers 3, Angular and Bootstrap: http://map.geo.admin.ch/

Hi these look really impressive, at the moment I'm building something with Openlayers 2, any feel for how big of a jump it is to port stuff to ol3? Are things like selectfeatures/styling the same or has all changed?

There's equivalent functionality is OpenLayers 3, but the API has changed.

Nice! Suggestion on the animation 'Fly to Bern' - change how far the map zooms out depending on how far it needs to move.

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/6301872

http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/zoompan.pdf

Thanks! This is a really nice algorithm. We should be able to add it to ol3.

I would like to add that @mourner, Leaflet creator, gave a great talk last week in San Francisco about why he started Leaflet and how the open source community developed around it. Talk is here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQAl43Aj_B0&feature=youtu.be).

One thing that I think is missing from this article is the communities around these projects and release cycles. Leaflet by far has the most active community around it. Where Open Layers 3 has been chugging along without a release for a while, and Google Maps API has remained pretty stagnant. A great post from Keir Clarke (http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-slow-death-o...) that is spot on.

> Google maps also has a surprising range of functionalities, although you are pretty much restricted to Google's way of doing things (you cannot, for example change the background map to be based on Open Street Map).

the parenthetical is incorrect, cf.

- http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Maps_Example#Examp...

- http://harrywood.co.uk/maps/examples/mapstractionv1/google-o...

> OpenLayers has a very wide range of functions, and it pays the price in terms of size, occupying almost 1 Mb of digital space: not ideal for mobile applications.

The stock minified OpenLayers.mobile.js weighs in @ ~377kB: http://openlayers.org/dev/OpenLayers.mobile.js

And you can build your own OpenLayers files that contain only what you need: https://github.com/openlayers/openlayers/tree/master/build

(eg. is your mobile application really going to use OSM and Bing base layers? probably not, so don't ship all of that to the user's browser and spare the browser from parsing the cruft. https://github.com/openlayers/openlayers/blob/master/build/m... )

Interesting article. We use Google Maps to lay out a list of Manufacturers for hardware companies (http://protoexchange.com/#!/directory)- we use Google's API + Angular.

This article might have us reconsider OpenLayer!

that's a really funky url - /#!/directory)-

is that due to some framework you're using?

framework :)

And Bing?

Testing web map APIs – Google vs OpenLayers vs Leaflet