At this year’s insights ’09 user conference, we shared the stage with Microsoft and demonstrated how organizations can “power up” their Bing Maps to make better decisions using spatial analysis.
Developers were particularly interested in learning how our MapXtreme® software development kit turned the maps generated through Bing and Google into powerful business tools. In a sense, making it easy for developers to transform cartographic images into true location intelligence.
While there are clear advantages to comprehensive desktop applications such as MapInfo Professional, Web 2.0 does provide an environment where you can interact and modify your map tile images instantly. So it’s not surprising that the use of low-cost, web-generated imagery offered through Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) and Google is common.
What’s missing from Bing and Google? Two things. Your data and a powerful analytics engine. That’s where MapXtreme comes into play. No matter how much you can accomplish in a browser, you need to do more if you want to make decisions that will advance your business.
Consider a retailer choosing a site for their next location. After you plot in your existing sites, you may want to overlay competitors, customers, market demographics, use SQL JOIN clauses, create buffers, run point-in-polygon analyses and more—that’s where middleware and enterprise mapping comes in to play.
SDKs like MapXtreme allow you to integrate your own data and conduct complex spatial analysts. A tile-based Rich Internet Application architecture ensures that map retrieval is fast, client side interactivity high, and server-side processing reduced. Designed for enterprise use, the tile-based approach provides for the navigation of sophisticated quantitative data in a consistent and intuitive manner—without sacrificing cartographic quality.
Tile servers are becoming increasing popular for web mapping because they allow the application to pre-render parts of the map and store them as images. The ability to combine web, proxy and private caches based on site and user needs provides developers with many options and possible configurations. In other words, with the right tools your favorite mapping applications can now do the heavy lifting needed to solve today’s complex business challenges.
For more information on MapXtreme please download our free eval at:
Hi,
Can the tile mapping functionality (google/bing) also be used in a desktop application based on mapxtreme 7?
Guy