[drupal-devel] question re maps in drupal (fwd)

[Anselm Hook]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:57:41 -0700 (MST)
From: Anselm Hook <anselm at hook.org>
To: civicspace-dev at civicspacelabs.org
Subject: question re maps in drupal


I have some questions about approach...

Here is some work we are doing on supporting maps in drupal / civicspace:

  http://ghost.thingster.org/cs//?q=node/24

It is based on this piece of work that we published a couple of days ago:

  http://maps.civicactions.net

The approach I am taking is to minimize the weight of the mapping layer
inside of drupal itself and to rely entirely on a rich client-side engine
written in javascript.  The engine talks to any conventional WMS server
and is optimized for tile based access for performance.

This relies heavily on the idea of drupal publishing RSS feeds where nodes
are decorated with location information in the form of geo:long and
geo:lat.  The location module is also something I am relying on to do
this.

Not everything in drupal is published as XML however.  You could not right
now easily build a Javascript version of a drupal site for example ( I
think ).

Is there an AJAX plan in the works and any time frame for that?  In
particular I'd like to build a small 'filter users by location' XML
exporter - but there are other things beyond that one example.

Should I hack this myself, wait, do something comprehensive etc?

Basically there is a tipping point between 'do this one little hack' and
'build out an AJAX API'...  I'm not on top of what the drupal / civicspace
plan is however and any input is welcome.

 - a