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copied!<p>It's not necessarily a question of OpenLayers OR Google Maps. You can after all use Google Maps for your map background in OpenLayers. Some more specific answers:</p> <p><em>Why OpenLayers?</em> </p> <ul> <li>OpenLayers can combine maps from different sources (Google Maps background, WMS overlays, vector data from KML or GML files or WFS etc)</li> <li>You can style OpenLayers much more thanyou can Google Maps</li> <li>Open source, you can check the source code when debugging</li> <li>If you need high precision in the maps, use OpenLayers with a suitable map server backend rather than Google Maps to get a better map projection (Google Maps assumes that the earth is a perfect sphere)</li> </ul> <p><em>Pitfalls</em></p> <ul> <li>If you want to use vector (WFS) data from another server you need a proxy, due to cross site scripting limitations</li> </ul> <p><em>Performance</em></p> <ul> <li>Depends mainly on the speed of the map backend</li> <li>Displaying many vector features (limit is browser dependent, but say > 200 on one view) takes time, but that is more a browser thing than a problem with OpenLayers</li> </ul> <p><em>JavaScript frameworks</em></p> <ul> <li>Have a look at <a href="http://www.geoext.org/" rel="noreferrer">GeoExt</a>, which is ExtJS + OpenLayers, for example</li> </ul> <p><em>Available maps</em></p> <ul> <li>OpenLayers doesn't come with a map backend. You can use Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, MS Virtual Earth etc, or any WMS and WFS service yuo have acess to</li> </ul>

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