QueTwo's Blog

Flex,Maps

Mapping for me has always been one of those things that just wasn’t interesting, and well, something my apps just didn’t need.  Now I’ve got two apps in the hopper, and both could benefit from a mapping solution. Since my University has their own staff that is responsible for GIS, I thought the way to go was to tap into their database to display a campus map. I saw a demo from ArcGIS at the original 360|Flex back in the spring, and got really excited.  The component that was shown was in Beta, and so I waited.

In doing some research, I recently ran across a project called modest maps, which lets you implement 3rd party mapping solutions (Yahoo! Maps ,Goggle Maps, and Microsoft Live Earth), in addition to some open source maps and lets you place them right in your app.  What is neat about it is it takes the map tiles directly from the 3rd party and renders them in your app, making it seamlessly.  Completely awesome!  I simply had to import the ActionScript into my project, and drag-and-drop the map component into my canvas.  It really was that easy. Even though the project isn’t done (but according to their trac, they are close to 1.0), it seems to work very well.

I’ll write about it even more as I get closer to putting this app into production..