Anyone worked with the Google Maps API ?

I am finally getting round to trying to plot where our club members are located.

I have the Post Codes, but cannot immediately find how to plot them automatically.

http://www.mocgb.net/mocgb-googlemap2.htm

I need to do some more research, but was hoping someone here may have already solved the problem for me :-)

Mark

Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 12:24 pm Post subject:

I had a play with it a couple of years ago, but with 37 points on the map, I got complaints about how slow it was.
I didn't use postcodes, though.
The gadget that plots the points requires lat and long, but there is apparently a function to get these from an address.

I've dug the relevant files out, and put them in wwwDOTnabd.co.uk/googlemap
replist.js contains the info for each point
mapping.js contains the code

I eventually went for a solution creating a map (jpg) on the fly in php - much faster, and zooms enough for it's purpose www.nabd.org.uk/contact/showreps.html

Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 1:27 pm Post subject:

Hi Jim,

Thanks for that, this looks just like the thing I'd like to expand upon.

I have taken a copy of the code, if I can get it working with my data, I'll make sure I leave the copyright/credit in.

Mark

Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 7:54 am Post subject:

It's done, after 8 hours of researching, and debugging.

www.mocgb.net/google_maps_rev1.php

Before I release this to the masses, I thought I'd post here, as I am a little concerned about performance, I do not want to cause problems on the server.

I ran it a few times last night, and it was OK a few times and very slow at others. This could have been my Virgin Media cable line though.

Mark

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5625

First load was quite slow, but when the map appeared I could see why! I'm not sure you can expect much better performance with that amount of detail. It's also browser dependent: it was relatively snappy in Opera and especially Webkit, but quite slow in Gecko. Clicking on a flag produced an empty white box in all cases, not sure if that's what you were wanting?

Andrew

Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 10:22 am Post subject:

I was expecting worse performance, and it is not bad considering it has 1200+ points.

The white boxes were designed for future details, but I'm having some feedback from members that they do not want this function, so I need to comment the code out

I was more interested to see if it was having a server impact, as I suspect initially many people will run it, then in time, it will hardly get run.

Mark

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5625

As far as I understand it all the processing is done by the users browser and Google so there shouldn't be any major server impact

Andrew

Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 1:56 pm Post subject:

As Andrew says, once the (190+k) page has downloaded, there's just a couple of hits on the Google server, then wait while javascript does it's thing.

Looking at it on a win2k system, FF took around 30 seconds to display (CPU at 100%).
IE6 sent my CPU to 100% for 1 1/2 minutes, and gave a blank page. Hitting refresh took 1 1/2 minutes again, but did show the map.

Re the white boxes, I did find text in a few of them, but most were blank.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 147

Windows XP SP2 here. It made Firefox hang for around 10 seconds each time it was loaded... a little less with IE7 & Safari. Once up and running it's slow but usable.