We’ve been working with one of clients on marker performance. The problem with markers is they take a long time to load up especially when you add a lot of makers eg. over 100 markers. The performance gets worse when you add polygons or polylines to the map and as you add or remove layers to the map

One of the problems is that the marker class is full of features - Info Windows, shadows, custom icons etc. The browser has to manage all of the DOM objects for the functionality.

To improve the performance, we’ve created a new marker class called GMarkerSimple. The class has a cutdown set of features ie. ‘onclick’ and ‘openInfoWindow’ to improve the speed. We have also introduced a marker cache to ‘cache’ marker objects in memory to improve performance when adding and remove marker layers.

The performance improvement is quite astounding, especially when you compare it to Google.

FireFox 2.0.14

IE 6.5

Don’t take our word for it. Try it for yourself - 100 marker test, 300 marker test.

I attended the Spatial barcamp and GoVis conference last week and here are my thoughts.

I thought the conference was great way for the industry to get together and network. It was nice to see some interesting talks from the speakers on how GIS was integrated into enterprise solutions

Open source good, Open standards better

The New Zealand Geospatial Office is promoting the use of open source tools (mapserver, mapguide etc) and open standards around government agencies. Its great to see more open source being promoted.

The use of open standards, KML, WFS, WMS etc will be a good way for people to share data. As a industry we already have a lot of proprietary formats, we need to promote open standards to enable better interaction between organisations.

I would offer a word of caution, using open source tools (just like anything else) is not going to be a magic bullet solution. You need to select the right tool for the job.

At ProjectX, we used a number of open source and propriety tools to make our maps. We’ve switched from mapserver to Manifold and now back to mapserver because the quality of the generated imagery wasn’t good enough for us.

Innovation under the surface

It was great to some innovations and ideas that going on out there. Big things like Aerial capture via microlight and dynamic object tracking systems, and smaller things like Napier City council making more of it core data available via open source tools.

It made me think, that as an industry (and companies in NZ) we don’t market our ideas very well. Even at ProjectX, we have a lot of things we built for clients or internally that is innovative and leading edge that never sees the light of day.

To that end, I’m working with Gavin from gis.org.nz to create a news portal for GIS / Geo-spatial news in New Zealand. We’re looking at creating a news system for companies to talk about new products, ideas and issues in the our space. We’re in the process of setting it up properly now, so stay tuned.

Partnerships

It was refreshing to see that all the GIS departments in the Auckland region were working together. Personally I don’t think there are enough partnerships between players. There is a lot of innovation happening in NZ, and we need to work together to take on the world!

Yesterday, we released the improved feature of sharing ZoomIn maps, which allows users to embed maps on their websites, also enable users to customize the width and height of the iframe.

Here is an example, I’m using ZoomIn map to show the location of ProjectX

Google maps, ZoomIn maps and et are like the MP3 of the GIS world. It has made mapping and spatial visualisation available to everyone with a browser. Just as MP3 maybe not be good enough for audiophiles, google maps is not going to be powerful enough for a lot of serious GIS work. The simplicity of Google maps is going drive the consumption of GIS information into a new era.

Spatial bar camp is being held in Wellington on the 1st of May. They are running a spatial mash-up competition in which they are asking companies or people mashing spatial data. More information at http://barcamp.org.nz/wellington-spatial-mash-2008-1-may-2008

ProjectX will be submitting 2-3 entries, showcasing our new visualisation engine.

Today’s Digital Future Summit 2.0 saw the launch of The National Broadband Map, built with ProjectX technology. Its purpose is to help improve access to broadband, especially in the regions, through “demand aggregation”: pooling the demand for telecommunications services in a specific geographic location.

Individual users might find it hard to convince a telco to roll out services in their area, but when those users combine, they can often reach the critical mass required to attract investment in the provision of new services. For instance, if you’re a graphic design business in a small provincial town, you might struggle to convince a provider to extend their infrastructure to reach you; but if there is also a school, medical centre and library down your street, plus several other businesses and private residents who are also interested, then the telcos might sit up and take notice.

To this end, the map shows existing state sector locations, as well as allowing businesses and private residences to enter their own locations and describe their level of demand. It also shows existing network infrastructure, and includes all the address search, autocomplete, zooming and panning functionality that is familiar to ZoomIn users.

The system was developed by ProjectX together with the State Services Commission, and involved the collation, geocoding and checking of thousands of state sector locations, and the conversion of network data from all sorts of formats and projections, as well as building on existing ZoomIn Mapping System API functionality. For instance, the ZMS has always had the ability to display vector layers (polylines and polygons) as overlays on the maps, but the size and complexity of the network infrastructures required some hard work from our developers to optimise the performance of these layers, as well as dealing with the inevitable curly cross-browser compatibility issues.

In keeping with the Web 2.0 theme, the Map is labelled “Beta”, and it will evolve over time. Partly that will be due to the growing information base, from user-added places and as we receive more state sector locations and existing network data. There will also be functionality and usability improvements over time, and we encourage user feedback so that we can make this as comprehensive and easy-to-use as possible.

Following up from yesterday’s post about the Open Source Awards, here’s a new local discussion group about the use of open source software in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). As a web mapping company, we make heavy use of open source software in both the web and the mapping sides of our business: I’ll come back to the web side, but here are some quick notes on the open source GIS packages that we use.

• PostGIS: I won’t make great claims for its performance, but the spatial extensions to PostgreSQL are pretty impressive and getting more powerful all the time.
• MapServer: this hasn’t been our first choice for map tile rendering in most cases, but now that version 5.0 is out with its gorgeous anti-aliasing (thanks to the AGG library) it’s looking more and more appealing.
• QuantumGIS: it’s not exactly ESRI or MapInfo, but it’s quite useful as a basic desktop GIS app, and the ability to export to SVG (for further tweaking and polishing in Inkscape, or for XML hacking) is great for publication work.
• OGR utilities: indispensable! Good old-fashioned simple command-line tools for exploring, converting and generally mucking around with the obscure world of GIS data formats.