Modest Maps vs Processing

Source Code Webside

The greatest thing about Google Maps, and the follow-up hit album API, is that it made a big song and dance about the concept of continuously scrolling maps. So now everyone has to have one. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many other big companies have server farms full of tiled maps of varying zoom levels, and free-to-use javascript APIs to let you put your own data on top of them. Sadly, they don't all offer a way to use those same images in Flash applications, which is what prompted my colleague Mike and friends to write the original Actionscript 2 version of Modest Maps (and our subsequent port to AS3 and Flex) nor is it possible to use the map images server-side, which prompted the port to Python. Python is also Mike's thinking language of choice. Mine is Processing, so improving Modest Maps has always been something of an uphill struggle for me. (I've also been in this territory once before, with Mapstraction, so I was reluctant to dive in again with the tool-making).