More Google Maps Stuff

The more I look around, the more I’m finding re: Google Maps. This is a really interesting situation for the GIS industry – Yahoo & Google are really getting “where” into the minds of the masses, and now we (GIS software developers) need to provide solutions that build on this level of interactivity.

Here’s a blog all about Hacking Google Maps http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

Our response to Google Maps…

This has been a large topic of conversation on our team – how much do we try to Google-ify our GeoPortal? For sure we’re going to use AJAX to get the partial page refreshing, and a more interactive UI. A while back I wrote about an ASP.NET server control for a “Map Canvas”. Well, today I jumped back into that, tore out the old event handling code (which relied upon a postback to the page), and slapped in some proof-of-concept code for using AJAX.NET to fire server side map refresh events. It’s going very well, and should present very few problems. We’re still a ways off from having a demo site up (I don’t have it linked to a map server connector yet, so I’m just swapping in random images etc), but hope to have a working demo in the ESRI UC timeframe.