Friday Web Map Fun

So yea, Friday should be a good day to prepare yourself for the weekend. To help ensure that I’ve got a couple of interesting links to share.

  • TileMill - If you haven’t heard about TileMill yet, clearly you aren’t on the Internet. One of the biggest issues with creating maps online is you usually either needed a bug bulky desktop application to style them, or you had to go all ninja in notepad. Either way, you end up hating yourself which is never good on a Friday. TileMill leverages Carto for styling which uses CSS (CSS for map creation has been a huge goal of mine for years). CSS to me is a natural way to style maps, unlike AXL, SLD, and MapFile. All this cartography greatness is rendered with the awesome Mapnik. Right now you need to stop how you are styling maps and move to TileMill, there is no other choice. Look at the awesome people are already creating.

  • I’ve been called a Flex/Flash hater (Actually I’ve been called worse, but I can’t repeat it on the Internet), but clearly, Flex is here to stay for web mapping. We’ve seen some APIs from proprietary vendors, but if you want to roll in the open/free/beer crowd, you need to check out OpenScales. Matt Sheehan has a good overview for open source developers that want to use open source for a web mapping front end, but not OpenLayers.
  • Lastly, geographika ponders if HTML5 will change how we map raster graphics. I embrace that new world and hope it gets here sooner than later.

Enjoy your Friday and weekend, folks!


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Date
February 18, 2011