It’s been a bit more than a month since my last post. However, I have a good excuse, I’ve been working in the gbtopia Maps application. It started as a simple static AJAX application where I manually created an XML file based on an example at Google’s site, and I had to input the coordinates and information for each marker manually. However, it has evolved into a dynamic application with the following major features:

• Supports creation of multiple maps
• Multiple markers per map
• Each marker may have several trips associated to it
• A trip has origin, destination, dates and URLs that point to photographs, or additional information
• Markers can be tagged, a tag cloud is displayed, and the marker list can be filtered by choosing a tag
• Uses data from the most appropriate source by querying up to five different geo location services
• If multiple results are found for a location, it’s possibel to choose and preview each result before adding the marker
• Supports “inverse markers”, a marker is added by double clicking on the map and an inverse query is executed to find location details
• Administration interface may be hidden to take advantage to maximize map size.
• All external operations are done through AJAX calls, so the page is never reloaded.
• Powered by Google Maps with v2 API

Some of the technologies that I’ve been using in this application are: AJAX (which, for the uninitiated, includes Javascript and XML), XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), Java Servlets, JDBC, MySQL database, CSS, DOM.

The bad news is that gbtopia maps are not yet ready for the general public. I’m still polishing some details and hope to have an alpha release soon. However, if after reading this description you’re thrilled to try them, leave a comment and we can work something out.

Here’s a screenshot of the maps as of right now. Click on the image for a full size version.

Update (2007-03-26): I have released an alpha version of Global Access Maps, click here for more information.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 6th, 2006 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.