OpenLayers Web Mapping Library

OpenLayers is a high-performance, feature-packed library for creating professional-grade web mapping applications. Originally developed by MetaCarta in 2006 and now maintained by the OpenLayers Contributors community, the project has over 11,000 stars as of 2026 and is used by government agencies, meteorological services, and enterprises worldwide for building interactive web maps. Key features include: multiple layer types (tile layers for WMS, XYZ, WMTS, TMS, Bing Maps, Stamen, CartoDB, OSM, and ArcGIS REST; vector layers for GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, GML, WFS, and custom formats; image layers for single-image WMS; and vector tile layers for MVT), projection support (EPSG:4326, Web Mercator EPSG:3857, and arbitrary projections via proj4js with on-the-fly coordinate transformation), vector rendering (Canvas 2D and WebGL renderers for high-performance point, line, and polygon rendering with thousands of features), styling (rich style API with fill, stroke, circle, icon, text, regular shape, and composite styles, plus style functions for data-driven styling), interactions (draw, modify, select, snap, translate, rotate, scale, drag-and-drop, and keyboard interactions for full editing workflows), controls (zoom slider, scale line, mouse position, overview map, full screen, rotate, attribution, and layer switcher), format support (GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, GML 2/3, WKT, WFS, MVT, MSLD, OWS, and OGC API Features), raster operations (hillshade, aspect, slope, color manipulation, and raster algebra via Raster source and WebGL tile layer), WebGL rendering (hardware-accelerated tile and vector rendering for millions of features), and animation (view animation, flight, bounce, spin, and pan-to animations for smooth user experience).