[DUG] TUMONZ SDK beta program

[Conor Boyd]

Thanks for that Phil.
 
Interesting to hear the reasoning behind the reality.  It's certainly a
competitive area currently (Windows Live Local being another one,
although it doesn't currently zoom in far enough for Dennis ;-)
 
Cheers,
 
C.

________________________________

From: delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz]
On Behalf Of Phil Middlemiss
 
We faced two options when we developed our online map: Go with the AJAX
technology (although when we started planning it, I don't think google
maps was not even around!), or go with Java applet technology. It seems
that we are the only NZ Java applet based map around. Whether it was the
right decision or not remains to be seen, but the main advantages that
pushed us in the Java Applet technology direction were:

1) very small packet sizes. Once the map is loaded, each "view" is
around 10-15kb of vector info (as opposed to a bitmap image of the map)
or less which makes for an instantaneous update, even on dial-up it's
fast.
2) use vector on the servers. Makes it easy to update layers
independantly and keeps the server requirements quite low. We can handle
rather a lot of traffic quite easily with a minimum of servers.
3) Freedom to design the interaction (ie navigation) however we wanted.
Animated zooming, intuitive mouse interaction on both the map and the
overview.
4) The possibility of reusing the Java applet code for other uses later
on (eg, mobile phones, cross platform thin client).
5) easy to add 3rd party layers.

Of course there are some downsides too, but as I said, it remains to be
seen if we made the right choice.
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