[OpenLayers-Users] unique OL useage

[Brent Pedersen]

i'd like to show off the start of what i think is a sensible, but
unique openlayers project, and likely the one with the smallest-scale
(or is it largest?) -- measured in nucleotides per pixel:
http://toxic.berkeley.edu/bpederse/tiler/genome.html  [mostly uncached
so it'll be slow if it's not been viewed before]

that's using a colleague's image generation [ perl/GD ] and the view
is limited to a single organism for debugging, but can be easily
changed to any organism for which we have sequence/features.  the db
queries + image generation is pretty slow, so i do caching via a
simple perl script [also added the ability to cache via tilecache but
we dont generally run mod_python or fastcgi].

this has just been a side project but is pretty simple and only really
involves _removing_ functionality from OL to make it 1D. things like
replacing spiralTileLoad() with linearTileLoad().

now, it's a matter of adding mapping niceties such as allowing the
user to enter an address (gene name or protein or basepair) and zoom
in and/or query. and speeding up the queries.

as a comparison, the current popular genome-browser--with more
functionality than i intend to add--looks like this:
http://dev.wormbase.org/db/seq/gbrowse/yeast/?name=I

i still have some work to go, but it's exciting to see genes floating
around in there.  thanks to the openlayers developers for making it
easy.

-brent