[OpenLayers-Dev] OpenLayers and drawing capabilities

Rioux,Mathieu [Montreal] Mathieu.Rioux at ec.gc.ca
Tue Apr 26 07:03:29 EDT 2011


Hi,

I've been working with OpenLayers on a daily basis since last year at
work. I've been developping a web-based tool for meteorological data
analysis and broadcasting which is currently only in a prototype stage,
being tested for performance and flexibility.

The tool was mainly built using openlayers and some other javascript
framework for rich interface needs.

We are currently looking for integrating drawing capabilities to our
application for allowing users to draw things such as isolines (curved
lines), areas of interest (smooth polygons) etc.. I am aware OpenLayers
already offers drawing capabilities for lines and polygons but it is
currently not efficient and powerful enough for our needs. Our main
preoccupation isn't about coding a drawing tool and integrating it to
OpenLayers, but doing it the right way so that it is flexible enough
without being too complicated to use for people who do not have much
time to play around.

This brings me to the main goal of this post. I wonder what kind of
research has been done at this time by the community for such tools and
whether some similar projects are in progress?

We have virtually eliminated the possibility of integrating things such
as customizable bezier curves for being too complicated for our users
(they are not experts of computer graphics concepts) and point-to-point
drawing for being too slow for drawing precise polygons and leaving too
much leeway on shape complexity and refinement. For instance, the tool
is expected to be smart enough so that multiple users (meteorologists)
would end up with similar results if they were asked to draw the risk
area of a tornado and it's precise trajectory, given proper
meteorological data. For exemple, one solution that we might explore is
hand-free drawing with multiple 

All information on that topic is welcome, 

thank you in advance for your help
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