Brennan’s Blog

I have updated GPlotter to make use of the revised Google Maps API. I also completely restructured the Javascript to a much more object oriented coding style. I am using the latest release of Prototype, which recently moved to a new location as well as posted a great deal of new documentation. I am using Prototype for the object inheritance and AJAX functionality.

GPlotter still works as it did before but Google did change the zoom level. You will want to change the zoom level in your XML files. (see Zoom Level Order) The documentation explains the new zoom should be 17 minus the old zoom value.

Perhaps best of all, to change GPlotter for your own custom purposes you can use the Prototype inheritance mechanism to inherit and extend GPlotter. And if you do extend or customize GPlotter I would like to see your changes. I would be happy to consider incorporating your changes into GPlotter if the new features are helpful to others.

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I have updated GPlotter. I decided to move to Prototype over XHConn. I simply wanted some of the features that Prototype offers, such as closures. The GeoCoder is also still available to help you build your map files. Simply enter an address in the form and click the Get XML button. It will pull the latitude and longitude data from the database on the server and present you with the XML you can drop into your map file.

I have also updated my free Google Maps Icons. It now includes the Photoshop file I used to create each of the icons. It should be easy to create different colored icons from the current green, blue and red.

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I have put together a new release of GPlotter along with the new GeoCoder to assist with building mapping feed files.

One key addition to the GPlotter is the new enableDebug method which can be called to enable a few alerts which will warn you if GPlotter failed to load or parse the XML feed. The pop-up will also now display the address along with the label for the location.

I have completed GPlotter. It is a very simple Javascript object which can read an XML file to map markers onto a Google Map. I chose to do it this way after initially updating a Google Map using a lot of Javascript which I felt was too easy to break. It is much easier and reliable to generate XML instead of Javascript, so this approach seemed the right way to go. I have posted GPlotter as version 0.5 and hope to add more features and publish new releases soon.

Currently the interface is very simple. Simply run the following Javascript.

var plotter = new GPlotter();
plotter.plot("map", "links", "locations.xml");

Optionally some properties can change, such as the color and the location of the map icons. GPlotter works with the icons I created which come in red, green and blue numbering 1 to 25. The default location for the map icons is /maps/icons/ but can be set with setIconUrl(). See the source code of the example page for GPlotter for all of the details. Check back here for future releases. And if you feel you have some ideas for features, please post a comment here.

I have several ideas for using GPlotter and the XML file format. For starters the XML file is a great way to represent an address book. The address books could include various groups, like locations for favorite restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

Also, the locations file could also be a meta reference on web pages. A Firefox extension could detect the meta value and open a website with a references to the mapping file to plot those locations. On the typical company website with a locations page listing multiples offices this could be used to quickly provide an interactive map to each office. Non-business uses could include maps for public parks or golf courses.

I have many other ideas and I hope to make time to implement them soon.

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