[OpenLayers-Users] WMS layers dynamically re-projected on to Google Maps base layer--how does this work?

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

Mike Quentel wrote:
> I saw a post concerning how a WMS can be overlayed on Google Maps.  

If you haven't figured this one out yet, here's an alternative:

If you can configure your servers or you can find data that is served up 
in Mercator, you can overlay any type of layer over Google with the 
(still experimental) GoogleMercator layer.

Since Google's data is projected in Mercator, it makes sense to me to 
treat it that way.  The Google maps API obscures this by transforming to 
coordinates to EPSG:4326 (longlat/WGS84).  This is handy for people who 
think in Lon/Lat, but it confuses things if you assume the imagery is 
projected in EPSG:4326.

So, if you let OpenLayers stay in Mercator and transform requests to the 
Google layer, you can overlay any layer in the same projection on top of 
Google's tiles - this is true for WMS, WFS, tiled, untiled, any vector 
data, etc.  The one requirement is that your data is served in Mercator 
as well.

If you can deal with Mercator, you'll get better performance letting the 
servers do the projecting.  You also get the ability to cache image 
tiles server side.

Just another option to add to your quiver.
See 
http://dev.openlayers.org/sandbox/tschaub/google/examples/google-mercator.html

This assumes the following:

# World Mercator
<54004> +proj=merc +lat_ts=0 +lon_0=0 +k=1.000000 +x_0=0 +y_0=0 
+ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +units=m  no_defs <>

Tim