Last year I presented at the New Zealand ESRI User conference about how Flash could be used to create a ‘richer’ experience for certain web mapping applications. Someone at that conference told me how people just weren’t interested in applications with large ‘footprints’ hmmmm, wouldn’t want to say that to those behind Flex, Silverlight or JavaFX. In fact only a couple of months later I saw an Adobe roadshow which focused on Flex and Apollo (now AIR) and I wasn’t surprised to see them using mapping within their demo’s.
Anyway my presentation looked at what GIS developers could do with Flash and ActionScript and in particular I looked at using the excellent components and ActionScript libraries from Jan Bliki – (it appears that Jan is moving his stuff across to FlashMapping.org)
Last month I noticed this post from Shane in Sydney, who has put together a great set of ActionScript packages for integrating the major map vendor API’s into Flash. He has provided all the code and some samples for each type of implementation, and the classes are being updated all the time – recent comments suggest possible integration with Ka-Map or OpenLayers which would be great. It would be good to see this stuff moved into a separate site as its a bit difficult to track progress in the comments section of the post.
Its obviously possible to use these API’s outside of Flash (and ‘lighten your footprint’!), but its perhaps not so easy to create a nice looking interface outside of Flash. Also using these API’s within Flash means that you can take advantage of some of the other features such as the easy integration of video, or the excellent Flash drawing API (although vertex editing in google is very cool!). I’m not sure how effective Flash is at connecting to the outside world, Shane looks like he makes use of the XmlRemoting objects to call out to .Net for his search capability, so if you want to integrate things like editing functionality into a Flash application using his libraries I guess remoting is the only way to go?
Take a look at: http://modestmaps.com/
The website examples is not so quite impressive, but if you download the samples and sources you could see some examples based on google, yahoo and ve tiles.
This project looks like a cool project
Diego, yeh the modestmaps stuff is cool – i downloaded the source a while back but haven’t got round to doing anything with it – the online tutorial is good too – I think Shane’s stuff would benefit from a site of its own and a couple of online tutorials too especially for those of us like me who are ActionScript beginners