Gernot Belger

It was never so easy to add an interactive map into your page!

When i discovered OpenLayers last year, i was really amazed what could be done within the browser by a simple JavaScript library... man, this is great! Adding an interactive map to a web page with background themes from any WMS, Goole-Maps, OpenStreetMap or other providers is just a matter of a simplistic JavaScript. About 20 lines of code will do it!

Apart from that, several aspects immediately convinced me of this project:
- a very straight, professional and mighty API, obviously built for extensibility
- a really great catalogue of examples, covering the whole API
- support for so(!) many map servies

Finally, extending OpenLayers is so easy! It took me just a few days (without any JavaScript knowledge before) to add new controls or layers for my special needs.

The sudden success of OpenLayers can be seen everywhere. Look hard at your well-known GIS-pages, you will soon recognize the OpenLayers layout everywhere...
The success of OpenLayers and it's ease of use is especially visible in non GIS-web pages like Role Playing Games using OpenLayers for their Walkthroughs (have you seen the Morrowind's map at http://www.uesp.net/maps/mwmap/mwmap.shtml ?) or great stuff like Rosettas disk of languages (see http://dvd.rosettaproject.org/disk_front/index.html), available online as...OpenLayer-Map!

Believe it or not. OpenLayers is the(!) Web-Map API of the future!

And... who the hell do you think provides the users and contributors map of Ohloh...?!