What is Mapiator?
Mapiator is an online mapping application like Google Maps or Openlayers. You can use it without any charge. It was created by Patrick Dietrich in February 2009.
Try it:
How can I use Mapiator in my site or web application?
In your page add a div element to contain the map:
<script type="text/javascript" src="Mapiator.js"></script>
...
<div id="map" style="width:400px; height:300px; position:relative"></div>
Then in your javascript do:
var map = new Mapiator.Map('map');
map.setZoomLevel( 6 );
map.setCenter(48.0, 10.0); // latitude, longitude
map.redraw();
That’s what you need to set it up.
What are Mapiator’s main featues?
- it runs in most modern Browsers including Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari and Google Chrome
- it runs on the iPhone (zooming by pinching fingers) - Try this page on you iPhone!
- it can be moved around with the mouse (“panning”) and zoomed in and out
- it can draw paths and polygons
- you can attach any DOM element to a fixed geo position (latitute and longitude) on the map (e.g. to add a marker)
- it has a clean and simple JavaScript API
- it is very small (only about 600 lines of JavaScript code uncompressed)
- it can be used with a wide range of different map tiles, e.g. with Open Street Map or the really great ones from maps-for-free.com
- it can read WKT strings from geo databases like PostGIS to display paths and polygons
What features are missing?
- wrapping the map at the date border is not implemented, yet
- zoom level 0 and 1 (the ones zoomed out furthest) are not as nice, yet
What technologies are used for the Mapiator
- paths and polygons are drawn using Canvas tiles (i.e. tiles are built from Canvas elements which can be moved around like map tiles to avoid unnecessary drawing).
- the rest is just DOM magic
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