MapQuest Devblog

Stand in the place where you live, Now face North, Think about direction, Wonder why you haven't before - REM

In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Advantage API by getting a developer key. In Part 2 I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In Part 4 I discussed more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options. Part 5 discussed adding widget options including the default zoom level, specifying point of interest icons, and the default map type. In this installment I'll discuss how to add direction capabilities to the widget!

Directions

Listing 1 demonstrates how to add directions to our widget map. I've added an additional search box where the user can enter the destination address. I've use the Java application developed in Part 3 to obtain the coordinates of the route beginning and destination points. Using the coordinates, I've created the MQGeoAddress object for both points. A new session is created for routing. The starting point and destination are added to the way points. Once the route is calculated through the doRoute method, the highlighted route is added to then added to the map.

Ok, I was driving (very carefully, mind you) on a very sunny afternoon to the airport, and I got a call from my very bright and brilliant niece who recently enrolled into Michigan State University (MSU if you're a Michigan native). During the midpoint of the conversation, all I heard was "cell phone silence", for lack of a better term, and within a few more seconds the call was dropped -- argh!

Obviously, I'm not the only person in the world who gets aggravated when a mobile call gets dropped. Of course, my wireless carrier has to go unnamed here in order to protect the guilty... er, uh... innocent.

So, after I called my niece to finish our conversation, I started to think. "Shouldn't there a way to show folks where the various dead spots are for the wireless carriers?" As you will see shortly, the MapQuest 5.2 APIs actually come in quite handy for solving this sort of problem. If you read my previous blog post and tried out the example code that I provided, then you should be familiar with the concept of creating a POI (point of interest) on a map and displaying it. Today, we're going to use overlays to highlight a region of interest. Take a look at the image below to see my "dead spot" awareness system:

MapQuest will be out in Santa Clara, CA this week attending the Location Intelligence conference. We have a booth set-up and will be happy to demo and discuss the MapQuest Platform with you.

Hope to see you there!

Developer David Bello has written a great plug-in for AIM called "Share-a-Map." That clever name may have something to do with why we're covering it here.

Right from the copy in the AIM Gallery:

Share-a-map is an AOL AIM plugin that let you share maps with a friend via AIM in an interactive way. This plugin can be extremely useful when you want to share a location, route or place with a friend or relative, plus other features like add images and hand drawing overlays, find an address or point, save your map, among others.

We've been playing with it here in the office and it is a really sweet way to do some map collaboration.

The Share-a-Map plug-in is Windows only and available in the AIM Plugin Gallery.

In my previous MapQuest posts I've mostly been demonstrating how to use MapQuest to display the the various types of geo-formats (KML, GeoRSS, etc). Building on the examples of map event interaction from my previous posts, we can also build an interactive map interface where users can build their own geo-format files. Here's an example where users can interactively click on the map to create a polyline.

This method, although similar to the method I covered in my last post, uses the InfoWindow of the map rather than a rollover associated with a Point Of Interest (POI). The InfoWindow is populated with the title and content when the overlay is moused-over, and follows the cursor, similar to a tooltip.

The biggest disadvantage with this method comes from the need to step outside of the API to attach a mousemove event. This means that the solution needs to take browser differences into consideration. In order to simplify the code, and because I generally use ASP.NET for most of my work, you will notice that I have utilized a few shortcuts provided by the Microsoft AJAX Library.

It is not down in any map; true places never are. - Herman Melville

In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Platform by getting a developer key. In Part 2, I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In Part 4 I discussed more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options. In this installment I'll discuss adding some options to the widget. Specifically I'll discuss setting the default zoom level when adding an API, specifying point of interest icons, and the default map type.

Earlier this month we told you about a "Great Mashup using APIs from Ribbit, Kayak, and MapQuest" by Andrew Powell, shamelessly plugging it to help him win a Wii.

Well, not only did Andrew win the 306|Flex API Contest and the Wii, he also won some help restyling the UI.

Check out the restyled and award-winning Ribbit, Kayak, MapQuest Hotel Search Mashup. Congrats Andy!

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

The source of news that I'm working with is the AOL national news RSS feed. The description element of each feed starts with a location. I extracted the location, geocoded each location with the MapQuest (MQ) geocoding service, and then placed point of interest (POI) markers on the map.

In my last post, I laid out my design for MapNews. In this post, I present the working application and code I've written based on the MQ client Javascript tool kit. The following screen shot of MapNews shows POI markers for cities that have news stories in an example feed. I've clicked on the POI marker for Salt Lake City to expose links to news stories in the information window.

Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map. - Larry Wall

In Part 1 I showed you how to get started with the MapQuest Platform by getting a developer key. In Part 2 I put that key to use by providing access to a basic map in the Map It! widget. Part 3 showed you how to incorporate basic geocoding. In this installment I'll discuss more advanced geocoding topics - including handling multiple matches and specifying geocode search options.

Multiple Matches

The version of the Map It! widget developed in Part 3 added the ability to plot a point of interest on the map. In the Java application that was developed to return the coordinates of an address, only the first match is returned. What if the user enters a street address without the house number? Geocoding would actually return multiple results. We need to change the getLocation method developed in Part 3 to return each match. On a search without a house number for example, the geocoding process would return points for each range of addresses. Listing 1 shows how the getLocation method has been modified: