At 2:10 PM -0400 7/13/06, Scott Cytacki wrote:
I saw an article in Linux Journal on using the google map api to draw
points and paths on the map.ÂIt was in one of the last 3 issues. They've had at least two articles
on this. It looked very simple to do. Just a few lines of javascript
to customize the map. This could be used to draw the path of Ed on the
google map. I know Ben gets linux journal.
I found a simple javascript example on the web:
http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/googlemaps/basic1.htm
See attached html file for an revised version of the example page that shows Ed's travel to Greenland with multiple points. Clicking on one of the points shows a note that has a url to the blog posting for that point. Donload the file to your local computer and load it into your browser from the local filesystem.
It would be easy to draw lines between the points but if the interval between reporting times is long the some of the lines could end up crossing land which would look a bit strange for a sailboat.
This works for me but from how I understand googles map api protocol it probably shouldn't – google requires the web programmer to get a free google map api key for each web dire3ctory they plan on hosting their own google map from. In my example I'm using the same key that was used on the example page and I'm obviously not serving it from www.econym.demon.co.uk/googlemaps anymore.
This is a another use case for having a way to talk from SAIL through the browser web rendering component to the javascript on a page rendered in the component. Data generated somewhere else in SAIL could easily be overlaid on a dynamic map. The level of AJAX in Google Maps overlaps with some of what Flash can do – and building value making mashups with the huge amount of data google has is great.
FYI, the page as rendered is 140k of map images spreadover 20 requests (includes copies of all the images data just outside the rendered frame), and another 110k of downloaded js from google.
