Mapbuilder

location based services

Key Features

* Browser based mapping client
* Standards compliant

* Can display maps from many different map sources
* Supports editing of map features

* Easy to use

* Fast and interactive
* Customisable and easy to extend
* Open source

* No plugins required

MapBuilder is a modern standards-based web mapping client . It Supports the Open Geospatial consortium(OGC) standards, allowing you to display interactive maps from many sources on your web pages from services conforming to OGC Web Map Service (WMS) or the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS). WMS allows you to request maps as rendered images (normally JPEG, PNG or GIF) and WFS allows you to request and update geographic elements using XML.

As well as allowing you to access mapping from 3rd parties, you can use MapBuilder to request maps from your own mapping server. A number of excellent open source mapping servers are available, including GeoServer and MapServer, both of which offer WMS and WFS. Using WFS in transaction mode (WFS-T) you can configure MapBuilder to allow your users to update geographic features on your mapping database from their web browser.

MapBuilder uses AJAX technology and will work most modern browsers (Firefox 1.0+, Internet Explorer 6.0+, Mozilla 1.3+, Navigator 6+) using simple Javascript calls. Your users will appreciate the speed and interactivity that AJAX provides, and if you wish to extend the capabilities of MapBuilder itself you will find that the modular design makes this particularly easy.

If you wish to learn more, you can try the on-line interactive tutorial or the Examples and read the on-line user-guide.