How to make a very simple map (like Google Maps)

[wim]

I need to make a layout of a company building, preferably one which can
be zoomed and dragged. Knowing that Google Maps does something like
that (but much more advanced), I was wondering how I can create such a
thing.
A simple map, with zooming and dragging, but without the additional
map-locating code or search features.


Any suggestions ?

 

[wim]

Thanks, but since the whole thing needs to look fancy and needs to be
as interactive as possible, I really has to be draggable and zoomable.

 

[Dominic Myers]

Thanks, but since the whole thing needs to look
fancy and needs to be
as interactive as possible, I really has to be
draggable and zoomable.

Look to SVG! Can be as fancy as you want with
ecmascript... but be prepared to spend time on it
;-)

 

[wim]

Hasn't anyone else ever built anything like this ? Was Google really
first in doing this ?

 

[Paul Cooper]

Hasn't anyone else ever built anything like this ? Was Google really
first in doing this ?

By no means. Web Mapping is a mature and active topic in Geographic
Information Systems, and there are very active standards bodies out
there - Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) on the industry side and ISO
TC211 on the formal standards side. There are quite a few similar
services to Google maps out there - look at www.multimap.co.uk, for
one, where advertizing is linked to a map. This is in principle little
different to Google maps, and it has ben around for years! I am
currently working on implementing a web Map Server and Web Feature
Server for Antarctica, using stable, well established open-source
toolkits to do so (Geoserver and PostGIS for those interested).

Google's new slant is to link mapping to their query engines.

However, this has little or nothing to do with Javascript - the volume
of data required to make anything work means that almost all the
intelligence is in the back-end on the server. I will be doing a
little Javascript development to portray map data over the next month
or so, but this is simply to allow a simple user interface to
construct complex URLs that are submitted to a server.

SVG is, of course, a popular portrayal mechanism for map data, but map
data are more complex "under the hood" and SVG is not suitable for the
back-end storage and manipulation of map data.

Paul

 

[wim]

Well, I'm not really looking for a full mapping solution. The thing I'm
looking for is how to :
- display the images the way Google did (where you don't see it's
separate images and right-clicking them results in nothing happening)
- make the images draggable (don't care about replacing the image
titles with others, because my map won't be big...)
- put the zoom buttons on top of the image

Any help on those things would be very helpful, as Google's source code
is very big and not exactly clear, even with some comments I found
online.

Kind regards,

Wim

 

[Paul Cooper]

Well, I'm not really looking for a full mapping solution. The thing I'm
looking for is how to :
- display the images the way Google did (where you don't see it's
separate images and right-clicking them results in nothing happening)
- make the images draggable (don't care about replacing the image
titles with others, because my map won't be big...)
- put the zoom buttons on top of the image

Any help on those things would be very helpful, as Google's source code
is very big and not exactly clear, even with some comments I found
online.

Kind regards,

Wim

But Google probably use the kind of solutions I mentioned on the
server in order to provide the functionality you see. Seriously, this
isn't a client-side problem, as it requires the manipulation of
potentially very large databases. Yes, you have a limited problem, but
the problem you pose is in general not limited. FMTools (which
contains an implementation of Mapserver) might help you - it provides
image serving as well as serving vector data.

Pul Cooper

 

[wim]

As I said, I don't care about the backend. I can build things like that
without any problems. My problem is building the frontend. I have no
idea how to get a draggable image with zoom buttons on top of it. And
there seems to be no website explaining how to do something like that.


I can't find anything called FMTools except an FM radio system.
Any idea where I can find it ?

 

[Paul Cooper]

As I said, I don't care about the backend. I can build things like that
without any problems. My problem is building the frontend. I have no
idea how to get a draggable image with zoom buttons on top of it. And
there seems to be no website explaining how to do something like that.


I can't find anything called FMTools except an FM radio system.
Any idea where I can find it ?

I beg your pardon - it is FWTools, and can be found at
http://fwtools.maptools.org/

Paul

 

[wim]

Great stuff. Too bad it doesn't have any code for dragging the map like
Google Maps