openlayers/examples

Code examples

Although the main purpose of these examples is to demonstrate how to use the API, they also serve other purposes in the development cycle, and so are not exactly as they would be in normal application code:

• every time the library changes, they are compiled together with the library as a basic check that they remain in sync with the library
• they use a special loader script to enable defining at run time which build mode (raw/debug/advanced) to use

To enable this, examples have the following, not needed in application code:

• each html file loads loader.js; application code would not need this, but would instead load the appropriate library build file, either a hosted version or a custom build
• each js file starts with goog.require functions, used by the compiler; application code would only have these if the code is to be compiled together with the library and/or Closure library
• some js files use type definitions (comments with @type tags); these are also used by the compiler, and are only needed if the code is to be compiled together with the library
• html files load example-behaviour.js and some js files define the Map renderer option as exampleNS.getRendererFromQueryString(); application code would not need these
• in addition, examples use Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery; this is of course not a requirement - you may use whichever presentation/helper libraries you wish

See Quick Start tutorial for a simple example of how application code would use the library.