RE: [flexcoders] Map Tile Library

[Kelly]

I just completed something like this for www.pikeo.com   They were using mapquest to provide maps but they didn’t like the way it worked so they had me rebuild the Microsoft Virtual Earth control ( http://local.live ) in Flex.   The tiles are all loaded from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth servers. (We got a licensing agreement with Microsoft)   The tiles are all loaded directly. The URL’s to retrieve the images are constructed using lat and lon coordinates and zoom level. The trigonometry involved in this is sort of complex.   I would not have been able to do this without the help of Paul Neave who provided me the source code for his FlashEarth application. (http://www.flashearth.com/ )   Flash Earth was written in Flash 5 and didn’t translate well to Flex but without his formulas for calculating the tile urls I would never have been able to do it.   As far as drawing tiles from GIS data, I know nothing about that.   In Virtual Earth there are 19 levels of zoom. There are probably well over 300,000 tiles total.   I am not sure you realize how much work it would be to set this up when you are building both sides of it.   I only built the map viewer. I had nothing to do with creating the tiles themselves or the platform for serving them and I imagine it was an incredible amount of work.     If you need assistance contact me off list: [EMAIL PROTECTED]     --Kelly         From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:flexcoders@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of atlasalive Sent: Saturday, October 07, 2006 5:59 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: [flexcoders] Map Tile Library   I'm prototyping a map viewer application similar to Google or Yahoo maps. I will be connecting to image tile libraries that I create with another GIS application. So the one thing I know is that there will be a library of image tiles at different zoom levels and XML documents that communicate the metadata. These may be accessed directly or through a .Net web service. The server side will be .Net. All the tiles will be the same size. I'll need to implement standard map functions like zoom, pan, etc. I also want to do things like drawing polylines onto the map, overlaying icons, and the like. I'm new to Adobe Flex and I was hoping to get suggestions on an architecture. Basically 1) I need a high-performing system that retrieves the tiles and presents a seamless map to the user. 2) I would like to cache the edge tiles so the seamless effect continues when panning. 3) I'd like to be able to configure the application's number of tiles and tile size. 4) I'd like to make it flexible enough to draw tiles from a web service if necessary. 5) I'd like to deliver image tiles to the desktop separately and have the user 'point' to the local cache if possible. Apollo? Zinc? What visual components/techniques would best implement the seamless pannable tiled map? How does Yahoo do it? Any gotchas I should be aware of? What techniques /components will provide the optimal performance for accessing the tile libraries, either if they are files or web service calls? Are there existing bodies of work that I could use as a template? Are there mentors available who can help me up front? Anybody in the Seattle, USA area? __._,_.___ -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com SPONSORED LINKS Software development tool Software development Software development services Home design software Software development company Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe __,_._,___