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ZapMap of Silicon Valleyof Silicon Valley

 

 

when you want to know what's where...

 

 


THE VISION

Many location-specific businesses need interactive maps which load quickly and display information simply. ZapMap meets that need and offers versions which are inexpensive and custom designed.

ZapMaps are available at street level for the entire United States, and at city level for the rest of the world. Let us know what you are interested in by using this Feedback Form.

 

 

world map

 

 

Use ZapMap when you know WHERE you are going, and want to find out WHAT is nearby.

 

 

 

 

THE TECHNOLOGY

ZapMap.com started as an interactive, vector-based, geographic hot-spot directory of websites in Silicon Valley, written in Java. The need to substitute alternative images for browsers without Java led to the development of the hot-spot imagemaps you see now.

Before Java made the scene, and before attempting to write something this complicated in C++, I was coding maps using PostScript. And that's the language used to produce the GIF images.

The raw street data gets processed thru some Java utilities into a format for some relational database files which generate two simple files, one of places and another of streets. These files get fed into a Postscript interpreter which automatically figures the scale and center coordinates before generating a PICT file and the HTML source code for the place links. There's still some hands-on finishing touches required to position the place labels and turn off/on some of the street names.

Finally, convert the PICT image to GIF, link it to the HTML, and voila! one webpage of ZapMap.

 

 

programming flowchart

 

 

This is the process followed from start to
finish, creating a ZapMap from raw data.

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If you really want to talk tech, please join our ZapMap Yahoo! Group.

 

 

 

 
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