Is there any
interest from the group for an interactive map control in the Sandbox? We
have one which uses Yahoo's AJAX free mapping service (http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/index.html) which I am willing to donate. The
service provides a variety of cool features such as satellite and hybrid views,
overlay of GeoRSS feeds such as traffic and weather if available etc., street
level address geocoding (US and Canada) and city level geocoding for the rest of
the world. The service is free for non-commercial use but you need to
register with Yahoo to get a id for your application. Commercial use of the
service is available byu contacting Yahoo.
In its current
version the JSF control provides basic features for displaying addresses or
previously located points, map configuration and GeoRSS overlays and the ability
to include linked content in popups, and an extensible pluggable geocoding
framework with an alternate US geocoding service (http://geocoder.us).
Some possible
directions the control could go are to (a) generalize the API to include Google
Maps and possibly some for-fee services such as Microsoft's MapPoint.NET or
ESRI's ArcWeb Services, (b) provide alternate country-centric geocoding services
such as the free geocoder.us, (c) included local search APIs such as Yahoo's, or
Microsoft's
