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| Placebase Announces Custom Tilesets for Google Style Maps Placebase has announced availability of Rendermap, the first service that creates application-specific tilesets for Google style maps. These tilesets give customers complete control of base maps and allow web programmers to manipulate complex application-specific layers as well. Applications can be hosted by Placebase via its Pushpin LE service or by customers with access to an appropriate map server. Rendermap helps break the one-size-fits-all mold of Google style mapping services by giving customers complete control over the colors, cartography, and map data that define their maps. Rendermap can also pre-render overlays with significantly greater complexity than the pins, popups and lines possible with current services. And, uniquely, Rendermap can create underlays. These are required by advanced mapping applications where legibility and map integrity would be destroyed by overlays. Fully custom Google style tilesets can be designed to order by Placebase cartographers, or by anyone with ESRI ArcMap skills. As a result, customers with their own mapping data, for example aviation maps or real estate parcel maps, can have their own Google style maps pre-rendered, cached and ready to serve to any standard browser. Any map server that operates with graphical tiles can use Rendermap base maps. However, to take advantage of Rendermap's overlay and underlay capability, customers must use Placebase's recently announced Dynamic Layers for Pushpin LE. Rendermap consists of a fast computing grid with powerful graphics and render management software. The Rendermap grid is much like the render farms of theatrical computer animation, which crank away during filmmaking to achieve the widely appreciated computer graphics look. Rendermap similarly builds tilesets off line before deployment of their associated application. These tilesets are cached and ready for access when applications are brought up for the first time. Pushpin LE is a turnkey hosted mapping solution that allows web developers to create high-quality, browser-based map applications quickly and easily with the familiar look and feel pioneered by Google Maps. Pushpin LE also embraces and extends the Google Maps application programming interface (API), which has become a de facto standard among developers. To satisfy the needs of commercial customers Pushpin LE provides services and features such as help desk support, a service-level agreement, and non-branded or customer-branded maps. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page |