There are plenty of options for providing and consuming geographical data in an application and the choice of programming language, framework or software will depend on a large set of factors; will it be a mobile or desktop application? Will the application be constrained to run on limited hardware resources? Maybe there are strict requirements in terms of security that will require full control of application dependencies. Other factors such as existing knowledge within a development team or company or the application area might also affect the choice.
However, it’s undeniable that developing towards a web platform is a popular choice. With the vast amount of available frameworks and the widening set of capabilities of web applications such as accessing native functionality of the client device and doing client-side development using programming languages typically not used for web applications by targeting WebAssembly, this trend will most likely continue.
To briefly explore what we discussed we will during the scope of this article develop a simple static web site using the popular open source Javascript library OpenLayers. We will then use Carmenta Server to publish a map service and consume this in our client application. After reading this article and following along you should have some more information regarding the following
- Setting up a simple web application with OpenLayers
- OGC Interface Standards
- Publishing a simple map service with Carmenta Server
- Consuming Carmenta Server map services using OpenLayers