[OpenLayers-Users] Re: Open Layers and KML overlays

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 9/8/2011 5:25 PM, dcabasson wrote:
> I have pulled together a quick example at :
> http://dcabasson.atwebpages.com/test-kml.html
>
> The top map uses open layers with Google Maps (v3), while the bottom one is
> purely Google Maps (v3).
>
> When moving on the top map, the overlay is usually ahead of the base map,
> which is ... disconcerting, something that does not happen on the bottom
> map, where the overlay is added to the map on the server side by Google.

Denis,

I'm sure this example will be helpful to the devs and others that can 
look into the details of this, but if I step back and look at the big 
picture, I am trouble by the fact that:

1. OpenLayers is a client side only library
2. Google API is both a client library and server side application

So if Google is solving an inherent client side performance problem by 
moving part of the solution to the server side, then I'm not sure what 
would be realist to expect from OpenLayers. I have plenty of 
applications that use pgRouting, PAGC, mapserver on the server side and 
I often write Ajax handlers to talk to other server side tools usinf 
OpenLayers API, So it seems that may be a solution is that you could 
build a small server side component, maybe in php, that takes the kml 
file and uses say a bound box strategy to return portions of it that are 
onscreen, or something like that.

I also think that if you are requesting that the OpenLayers team wrap 
all of the Google API, that that is not reasonable either. I believe I 
just saw another post over the last few days, where someone requested 
the ability to get a handle to the Google API object in OpenLayers so 
they could access Google Specific features, which might be useful to you 
but it would seem to me to defeat the goal of building vendor agnostic 
applications and maybe you would be better off just building your 
application using the Google API.

Anyway, some food for thought.

Best regards,
   -Steve W