[OpenLayers-Dev] Using Google's roads and annotation on top of WMS/Aerials

[Andrew Turner]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Christopher Schmidt
<crschmidt at metacarta.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:02:55PM -0400, John J Reiser wrote:
>> Hello OpenLayers!
>>
>> I was wondering if it was possible to overlay the roads/labels layer from
>> Google Maps on top of a WMS layer. Right now, using the roads/labels from
>> the G_HYBRID_MAP type either creates a layer with a solid gray background
>> or appears under the WMS layer.
>
> This is outside the design of OpenLayers. I have seen users hack things
> to do it, but it's hard.
>
> The problem is that fixed layers (Google is fixed because when you drag
> the map, it doesn't shift) live in a different DOM hierarchy, which
> makes solving this task more difficult.
>
> I would say that at this point, you'd probably be better using Google
> Maps directly to solve this problem than OpenLayers.
>

Outside of OpenLayers specifically, I've done this by loading in
alternate TileLayers using the Google API (via Mapstraction). You just
need to get the Tile template URL and lower opacity. It's definitely
not a terrific solution, but workable.

It seems like OL could potentially do this as well?

Andrew