Map Scripting

This is part of a series looking at all 10 chapters of Map Scripting 101.

Adding markers to a map is so central that I considered including it in chapter 1. However, because it’s such an important topic, it really deserved its own chapter. In addition to adding basic markers, I covered the way Mapstraction lets you customize your icon and do other cool things that aren’t included in standard mapping APIs.

In my talks about mapping at conferences, I tell developers that using a custom icon is by far the easiest thing you can do to make your map stand out from all the other mashups. And there’s really no reason not to do it in Mapstraction, as it’s just one more line, as I showed in the custom marker icons post.

Once you have a map full of markers, Mapstraction has a couple pretty cool features to deal with them. In another line of code you can automatically center and zoom the map so that all of them appear. And Mapstraction also lets you add any data you want to each marker, then filter upon that data.

As the title of the chapter suggests, it also covers message boxes, the little windows that pop up from markers to provide additional information. You can learn all about message boxes, filtering and everything else in this chapter by downloading chapter two for free from the publisher’s website.