Slashgeo

The Earth Is Square and the official OpenLayers blog brings us news about the just released OpenLayers 2.6. A huge release in itself. It closes over 294 outstanding tickets and has a lot of new features. Please visit any of the following links above to get the full list of features.

In case you've been under a rock, here is a little background info on OpenLayers. "OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License."

The thematicmapping blog updates us on a previous article with an example of displaying vectors using the Google Maps Flash API. From their summary : "Most of the current map APIs quite cleverly use use the build-in vector support in Firefox and Internet Explorer (and others). Firefox supports Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), while Microsoft use the obsolete Vector Markup Language (VML). The Google Maps API and OpenLayers API automatically check your browser and draws the vectors with the appropriate technology.

But the SVG/VML/DOM technology has some serious performance issues - if you add many complex polygons the browser will run terribly slow. While we wait for HTML 5 (and browsers to support it), Flash APIs might be a better solution."

For more information and relative links, please visit the article link above.

Two recent geoblog entries discuss making Flash maps, the first one from APB on UMapper, a tool to create your own Flash widget maps built on VE, GMaps or OpenStreetMap: "UMapper is a web-based map authoring application that makes it easy to create, manage, and distribute online maps. The application is built on proprietary UMap technology, which allows it to display geo-data and any layer on top of any map data provider (Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google, OpenStreetMap). Once created, maps can be distributed via flash widgets." Here's the gallery. The second entry is open source goodies for Flash Maps: KMLParser, MarkerManager, and Planetary MapTypes: "Sometimes there's functionality that's ridiculously useful for a niche group of developers, and completely unnecessary for others. That's the kind of functionality that's now available in our brand spanking new "Google Maps API for Flash Utility Library" open-source project, and is ready for developers to use, modify, and even improve."

Both Mapperz and Spatially Adjusted shortly discuss Google's new AJAX API playground. From SA: "Google has a new tool that helps developers learn and test code for Google’s JavaScript APIs (similar to Microsoft’s VE Interactive SDK). The interactive AJAX APIs Playgound has an easy interface that allows users to interact with Google’s JavaScript APIs (Visualization, Search, Language, Blogger, Libraries, Maps, Earth, Feeds, and Calendar)." Meanwhile, the Google Geo Developer blog mentions new open source tools for the Flash API developers: DragZoomControl, MarkerTracker and KMLParser.