[OpenLayers-Users] Mapping the globe with OpenLayers

[Jani Patokallio]

Greetings,

New to OpenLayers and loving it -- but trying to do some apparently 
somewhat unusual things and running into problems in figuring out how to 
do it.  In short, I'm trying to develop an application that can show 
flight paths on a zoomable world map, eg. New York-London or San 
Francisco-Tokyo.  Using Layer.PointTrack, I've gotten the basic case of 
(x1,y1)-(x2,y2) straight lines working, but...

1) The maps I've tried so far (OpenCarta and OpenStreetMap) don't 
"wrap", so if I scroll west of Alaska or east of Japan, I get blank 
space instead of the other side of the world.  Is there any way to make 
this happen?

2) If I want to draw eg. San Fran-Tokyo, the line goes the "long" 
(wrong) way across Europe, instead of the correct short way across the 
Pacific.  It's not too hard to manually split the line in two and render 
them separately, but is there a more elegant way of doing this?  (Doing 
geometrically correct great circle routes would be extra-spiffy.)

3) PointTrack appears to require Geometry.Points, while Markers use 
LonLats.  Any way to use LonLats for everything?  Currently I need to do 
this:
    var point1 = new OpenLayers.Geometry.Point(-73.778889, 40.639722);
    var sourceNode = new OpenLayers.Feature.Vector(point1);
    lineLayer.addNodes([sourceNode, targetNode]);
    var lonLat = new OpenLayers.LonLat(-73.778889, 40.639722);
    var feature = new OpenLayers.Feature(markerLayer, lonLat);
    var marker = feature.createMarker();
  
4) How do I change the style of the lines drawn by PointTrack?  Changing 
the style of the component Points seems to do nothing:  
source/targetNode.style = {strokeColor: '#ff0000', strokeWidth: 10} 
still renders in the default style.

5) Can I render arbitrary text instead of icons as Markers?  I'd like to 
label airports with codes (JFK, LHR, NRT, ...), but there are 17,576 of 
them.

I'm getting the feeling that PointTracks may be the wrong approach, and 
I should perhaps be using MultiPoints or Curves or LineStrings directly, 
but documentation on them seems to be near-absent.  Any pointers about 
any of this would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
-jani