原文和评论如下：
原文：
The Geowanking mailing list tells us Google has opened parts of the Google Maps API for open source development. From the announcement: "Another reason for this open source project is that we've realized that there are many potential extensions for the Google Maps API, but that the common user still needs a reliable and quick-loading API. Adding custom controls/functionality to the core API adds to the file size and forces developers wanting to tweak the code to overwrite obfuscated JS functions. With this open source project, a developer can include the Javascrīpt file for the particular library they're interested in. They can even download a copy of it and tweak it for their use."
评论：
Time
for a conspiracy theory. Does this seem like an attempt by Google to
maintain their GMaps dominance by "stealing" developers from
OpenLayers. There has been a lot of great activity going on in the
OpenLayers community, targetted towards GIS users. It just seems like
Google can't keep up, so they are forced to open up their scrīpt source
to the public...which is not a bad thing per say.
I wonderred why they re-released that KML support announcement in GMaps
the other day. My suspicion is that they saw the work the OpenLayers
team was doing. They probably seen some of the vector editing support
they are adding (which feed back directly into GeoServer), and figured
thats the quickest way to add the support to their non GIS based API.
On the other hand, you have Openlayers(http://www.openlayers.org/)
which is built around GIS. It has things like native WMS support which
is huge imho.
Vector Editing : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/editingtool bar.html [openlayers.org]
Basic KML : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/kml-layer.h tml [openlayers.org]
Web Cam Hooks : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/webcam.html [openlayers.org]
WFS Vector : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/wfs-states. html [openlayers.org]
Support for Google/VE/Yahoo/Etc... maps : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/baseLayers. html [openlayers.org]
I have no affiliation with OpenLayers outside of using it. It's truly a great open API.
[ Reply to This
]
Re:Umm OpenLayers anyone?
(Score:3)
by
Satri (3)
on Monday March 26, @12:14PM
(#1353)
( http://slashgeo.org/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )
( http://slashgeo.org/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )
I
also like OpenLayers a lot. I wonder if Google and other proprietary
data providers through APIs could somehow stop OpenLayers from loading
their tiles?