At the last IVOA meeting in Russia, David Schade argued that "position
is the least important attribute of an object". He was talking about
astronomical objects of course, but it's probably true of VO services
too. Nevertheless, I wrote this:
http://thor.roe.ac.uk/weasl/index.html
It's built from the Astro Server Runtime, a google map, a GeoEncoder
service and some sticky tape.
It's not particularly slick at the moment - the server just writes out a webpage with all the javascript required to place the points on the map. It would be far better to make it more AJAXy and have the webpage request the points. Could make it a lot more dynamic then.
Gotchas
=======
None really. The ASR made it very easy, and Google is, of course, wonderful.
Registry Access
---------------
All done through the ASR. The trick was to check the type of all the returned Resources to see if it's a Service. Only then do you get access to the attributes you need.
Goole Map
---------
The map javascript is pretty good, though it gets a bit unresponsive above a hundred or so points. One gotcha is that the <div> that contains the
map worked fine as
<div id="map" height="" width=""></div>
but if you compressed the tag into
<div id="map" height="" width=""/>
the browser nested any following divs inside it, with hilarious consequences.
