First of all, hello everyone, I am new in here (as far as writing is concerned), but I have been reading messages in this group for some time now, and I find them very helpful.
Onto the point, I am not really having a problem, but I rather need an idea. Regarding displaying paths on google map, I know I can do it with maps api, and kml. When working with maps api, user's browser get "sluggish" with large amount of paths (i.e. 700 paths with about 50.000 points each). Another problem with this approach is, since my paths should be loaded using ajax, there is the waiting time after the ajax is complete, since I need to loop through the paths/points and plot them on a map. Lurking around the Internet, I found that there is method for compressing paths, but seems like it works only on v2 version of api. So I dismissed this as a bad idea for now. Second approach I tried is KML Layer, but it has it's limitations regarding file size (both kmz and kml), but it seems like a better solution, because if you can fit your data in the given restrictions, it works like a charm. No slowing down the browser, no looping through points and paths, etc. So what would be the best approach for displaying large number of paths on google map (without significaly slowing down user's browser)? I was considering following approaches: 1. Dynamically creating map tiles (using php maybe), and adding them as a map overlay. As a matter of fact I think I will use this method to display large number of points of interest (each type has it's own icon). I don't think I could use this for displaying paths since at some larger zoom levels, there might be tiles that do not have points in them, but two adjacent tiles could have points so there would be part of a line crossing that tile, which also needs to be draw. I think it would be too slow to do this with php. 2. I was thinking about setting up a map server which will serve data from database as a map overlay. I think that it would be the best thing to do, since it already has all logic for displaying map data. First I would convert all my POINT(x y) to LINESTRING() and then use map server to display it. What do you think? Is this the right way to go? Is there maybe some other way that I did not think of? How would you go about displaying large amount of paths on map? There are two things that I need to point out. First, map data changes every second (so I suppose caching is out of the question). Second, data in my database is stored as Geography field type, to be more specific every row contains both x and y as float, and one column as Geodata which contains POINT(x y). I suppose that there must be a way to accomplish this, and I am probably looking in the wrong direction. Thanks for your time :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps JavaScript API v3" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3?hl=en.
