[OpenLayers-Users] Proof of concept: quikmaps ported to openlayers

[Ken Hoetmer]

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 02:28:05AM -0400, Ken Hoetmer wrote:
>   
>> Greetings,
>>
>> After a bit of nudging from a few members of this community, and a bit 
>> of start code from Christopher Schmidt, I recently put some effort into 
>> porting quikmaps.com from the Google Maps API to OpenLayers.  You can 
>> preview the results here:
>>
>> http://openlayers.quikmaps.com
>>
>> This preview site is backended by the same database as the main site 
>> (http://quikmaps.com), so any maps created on one will be accessible via 
>> the other.
>> Currently, the site works only on Mozilla browsers supporting the 
>> <canvas> tag; IE support will need to come as openlayers support for 
>>     
>
> Ken: 
>
> Looks great! Any complaints about API? I see that you created a QMap
> class that's a wrapper around OpenLayers -- I guess that's so that you
> just have to choose between GMap and QMap? 
>
> I'm very impressed. Nice work. Let us know if we can add any
> functionality to make things easier for you.
>
>   
Chris:

Your guess is almost correct.  I have a version of QMap that wraps 
OpenLayers, and a version of QMap that wraps GMap, so that the core 
quikmaps code is abstracted from any specific mapping api.

A few functional things I noticed, though I'm certain these are well-known:

1. Memory consumption.  After running quikmaps / OpenLayers for only a 
little while, Firefox starts buckling under it's own memory load.

2. Popups / Info windows.  I've implemented a popup for visualizing 
marker content, but have not completed popups for the editing screen.  
In any case, a nice abstraction for delivering marker information (a la 
gmap's marker.openInfoWindowHtml) would be very handy.

3. Drawing API.  For the purposes of this experiment, I implemented a 
basic Polyline class and a few polyline routines in a Canvas layer, but 
this is not a cross-browser solution.