Following on from my earlier post regarding Google Maps and Flex, I’ve put together a new example which I reckon’s pretty nifty.
Somehow my idea was spawned by Andrew Shorten’s post which discussed using Google Maps and the new Adobe Cocomo service to create a collaborative mapping application. And I say somehow, as I’m not really sure how I went off on the tangent of geo-locating IP addresses when the original post was about two users drawing stuff on a shared map! Maybe they can see where each other is on the map and start drawing a line until they meet somewhere in the middle…
Anyway, (il)logic aside here’s the example I whipped up:
View source is enabled in the following example.
The “Geo-locate IP address” text field should auto populate with your current IP address. The initial map will load and center on London.
When coding up the infowindow that displays, I found this reference on the Google site very useful - http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/flash/reference.html
The actual information is coming from a whopping great big file that I’ve uploaded to my server which was supplied by Maxmind. There’s a few other databases that they supply, so I might add some more features to this example down the track. And they have pay for use and free versions of all their data, which is great!
A few years back I worked on a project that used the Google Maps API and at the time I was charged with recommending to the client whether to use Flash or Javascript/HTML to get the job done. At the time there was no readily accessible Flash API for Google maps, and I wasn’t that keen to go with the Yahoo or Microsoft offerings (though Yahoo now has a very robust Flash API, the Microsoft (surprise surprise) one doesn’t… though I found this Silverlight version). FYI the Kaurna Place Names site was developed to identify and map places with Kaurna (Aboriginal) names and to encourage the use and increase knowledge of these names. It begins with names in southern Kaurna country (which is the region of Australia where I’m from).
So there’s the back story. I recently came across a post which talked about the Google Maps API now being available for Flash AS3. With my current push to learn about Flex I was also pleased to see that there were components available that you could just drop into your MXML and whamo, insta-map!
Here’s what I pieced together, hopefully it illustrates what can be done with a few Flex components and the Maps code provided from the Google Maps developer site.
View source is enabled in the following example.
Obviously it’s not a scratch on Paul Neave’s venerable Flash Earth, but then this example only took 15 minutes to knock together ;-)
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