[OpenLayers-Dev] Abusing OpenLayers for a non-geo application: plausible?

[Hendrik Fuß]

Hi folks,

thanks everyone for the comments. So far I have experimented with a
Zoomify layer and a few editing controls and got really promising
results. I'm all excited. OpenLayers rocks!

OL/Zoomify seems to handle pixel coordinates well. I'm still
struggling to teach it micrometers instead of pixels... will need to
have a closer look at the docs I suppose. I will definitely look into
tile servers such as iipimage and djatoka, as well as into gdal2tiles.

I think most of the work on my side will be about serving and storing
vector content on the server side. GML is probably okay for me, even
if I feel a bit strange about using a "geographic markup language" for
my non-geographical application. I will also need to write some custom
event handlers for drawing on the client side: I need a freehand style
drawing tool, as well as ellipse and circle tools.

Is there any piece of developer documentation that you would recommend
apart from the APIs, such as books?

Again, thanks for your input. If I proceed with the project, I'm
hoping to finally contribute code back to OpenLayers as far as
possible.

bye
Hendrik



2010/9/27 Adrià Mercader <amercader.dev at gmail.com>:
> Hi Hendrick,
>
> Sean's answer covers all the main aspects you may face using OL with
> non-geo images. I would only add that gdal2tiles [1] makes extremely
> easy to build tiled pyramids for large images and their corresponding
> OpenLayers based viewers, like this one:
>
> http://amercader.net/books.html
>
> You may give it a look a see if it can help you.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adrià
>
>
> [1] http://www.klokan.cz/projects/gdal2tiles/
>
>
>
> Sean a
>
> On 24 September 2010 10:31, Hendrik Fuß <hendrik.fuss at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I'm sorry if you receive this as a duplicate post -- I've had some
>> problems subscribing to the list, so I'm not sure whether my initial
>> post got through or not.
>>
>> I'd be interested in your opinions on the following: I am planning to
>> develop a web application that is not exactly about geographical data,
>> but on a technical level has a lot in common with OpenLayers, so I'm
>> wondering whether I could 'abuse' OpenLayers for the task.
>>
>> The application is essentially about sharing and markup of large,
>> microscopic images. It allow users to upload such images for others to
>> view. Viewers should be able to zoom and pan through the image, mark
>> objects and create vector drawings on top of the image, then save
>> everything for others to view or download the vector data to
>> specialized microscopic software.
>>
>> With all the UI control, support for tiled images and markup,
>> OpenLayers looks very tempting to me, but I haven't had any exposure
>> to the development side. So I was wondering what you think, does this
>> sound feasible? What problems would you anticipate?
>>
>> many thanks
>> Hendrik
>> _______________________________________________
>> Dev mailing list
>> Dev at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/openlayers-dev
>>
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> Adrià Mercader
> -----------------------------
> http://amercader.net
>