We’ve tentatively chosen two applications to run our visualizations: Adobe Flex, which would handle netMap and chronoMap, and Google Maps, which would run geoMap (probably with a Flex overlay).
The choice for netMap and chronoMap was a tough one. There are few nice, open source tools out there, including prefuse, Simile Timeline, and Simile Exhibit. All of these are free, and very much in the spirit of Phylo. But each has its drawbacks, and using three different tools to run visualizations might slow down loading time and make integrating displays difficult. There’s also some worries about getting any Java-based tools to perform reliably in different browsers.
Flex overcomes a lot of these worries. It runs in a Flash environment (which is standard across all browsers) and it allows us to implement netMap and chronoMap in a single application. It also has some neat animated transitions, which you can see at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/samples/dashboard/dashboard.html.
The choice to go with Google Maps API was a bit easier. The application is constantly being expanded, and there are lots of ways to customize it for our needs. Ideally, we’ll overlay some Flex elements on Google Maps, but it’s hard to say where that technology will be by the time we launch.
At any rate, you can expect to see some slick and consistent visualizations run by Flex.
0 Responses to “Flex and Google Maps”