Real World Web Mapping

In this presentation, we'll explore the top four mapping sites and show you how to take advantage of their free services. MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, and MSN Virtual Earth all bring slightly different capabilities to the table. These sites allow you to create your own interactive maps with minimum effort and no previous mapping experience. They take care of hosting the mapping data and making it easy to manipulate – all you have to do is bring a little bit of know-how to the party.

Thanks largely to Google, web mapping is experiencing a renaissance. Google's mission statement is, “… to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. They aren't specifically talking about web mapping, but the sentiment certainly applies. If you have data that naturally has a geographic element (a customer list with addresses, sales reports by regions, even a collection of favorite restaurants), today's websites make it easier than ever to display them on a map.

Even if you aren't specifically interested in creating your own maps, this presentation gives real-world examples of many industry hot-button topics – SOAP vs. RESTful web services, JavaScript and AJAX, and a clear distinction between first generation web technology (Web 1.0) and what the pundits are calling “Web 2.0”.

About Scott Davis

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

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