[OpenLayers-Users] adding .shp layer

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 01:37:08PM -0400, Jeremy Jackson wrote:
> I see the arcgis example in the FAQ section that uses a png layer from
> ArcGIS server.  But does anyone know if openlayers supports a shapefile
> format?

In general, OpenLayers works with images; you can also work with vectors
in some formats, but the way to display a 'map' is to display it by
first rendering it to images.

ESRI has a "WMS Connector" for their ArcGIS Server products, as I
understand it, that will allow the server to act as a WMS that
OpenLayers can talk to.

Additionally, ESRI has some tools to create pre-cached version of tiles:
these can (as far as I know) be generated from either vector or raster
data: the key thing is that for OL to consume it, it has to be in either
an image format (WMS) or to be one of our supported vector formats (GML,
KML, GeoJSON, GeoRSS, etc.)

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta