OpenLayers presentation and OpenLayers Cookbook examples code update

A few months after the release of the OpenLayers Cookbook I have been working on a presentation about OpenLayers for @geoinquiets at Barcelona (BCN) that will be celebrated the next December 20th (see the event here) at the offices of Cantera-Tech.

Both the presentation and source code examples materials are freely available at my repository on GitHub as open projects and I would like you contribute to:

• OpenLayers Cookbook Examples: https://github.com/acanimal/Openlayers-Cookbook
• OpenLayers Presentation: https://github.com/acanimal/OpenLayers-Presentation.

The presentation is available online at http://acanimal.github.com/OpenLayers-Presentation and the cookbook examples at http://acanimal.github.com/Openlayers-Cookbook.

Please take into account some examples do not work because there is no backend PHP server to serve some required content.

About the OpenLayers Cookbook Examples

The OpenLayers Cookbook was released with a set of samples showing almost all the recipes in the book in action.

I built the samples as a RIA application with a menu bar for each chapter which allows to select te recipe to load and allowing to show the related source of each recipe.

To create the application I used Dojo Toolkit because it is a great JavaScript framework with a nice set of rich and homogeneous widgets.

As any piece of software, the book samples requires some updates from time to time and, because of this I decide to upload the source code to GitHub and update it to the version 1.1.

Next are some of the improvements you will find:

• Use of Dojo Toolkit from Google CDN (<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/dojo/1.8.0/dojo/dojo.js"></script>)
• Updated Dojo version to 1.8
• Updated OpenLayers version to 2.12
• Source code updated to use Dojo 1.8 syntax (using HTML5 data attribute) instead old one (non standar dojoType).
• Source code highlighted via CodeMirror project.
• Use of relative paths to load data files (attached to the project).

To run the samples you need download the code and put within your local web server (take a look to the documentation).

Remember, you are welcome to contribute and create new recipes !!!

About the OpenLayers Presentation

As a said at the beginning, I have the opportunity to make a presentation for the @geoinquiets folks at Barcelona.

But who are the GeoInquiets? Well, we are (I like to include me) a bunch of enthusiast and professionals related with GIS close to Barcelona.

Note: The GeoInquiets initiative has been successfully replicated in other hispanic places like: Madrid, Buenos Aires, Valencia, Tenerife, Galicia, Córdoba, Cantabria, ...

The presentation was made using simply HTML technologies to maximize its portability and avoid proprietary formats. Croncretely, I used the next set of tools to generate it::

• deck.js: A JavaScript library for building modern HTML presentations.
• deck.js-codemirror extension: Allows you to embed codemirror code snippets in your slides
• All UML class diagrams have been made with the free and online yUML tool.

Again, remember it is open sourced so you can contribute and use to make your own presentations.