Website like Google Maps

[vamsee]

Dear Friends,
I have a necessity to program from scratch and make a website that almost has the same functionality as google maps but for a different country altogether. I came to know that Ajax tehcnology was used to build this. I have around 4 years experience in PHP, javascript but never used Ajax until now.

I would greatly appreciate if some one would tell me from where do I start. Does anyone have any sample scripts that can give me a head start and improvise. Please any help regarding this would be very helpful.

Thank you,

Very Kind Regards,
Vamsee Vanaparthy

[redbullmarky]

why would you want to re-invent the wheel when in this case the wheel is a top of the range Goodyear with genuine silver alloys?

there are plenty of PHP wrappers out there that will allow you to easily integrate Google maps into your site, and the API is such that you've pretty much got full control over everything you need displaying.

mapping itself is a complex subject, and doing it yourself can be costly. finding a suitable map with the right projection, dealing with the scripts to plot latitudes/longitudes correctly, finding the latitude/longitude data in the first place (which gives you other problems, as the data is HUGE - i have a DB of about 3million+ cities from around the world with all their lat/long data), and then piecing it all together. it's a huge job, and one that i gave up in favour of google maps several months ago.

[b]edit:[/b]
however, if you're up for the challenge, you can start here:
http://www.web-max.ca/PHP/article_1.php

and you can get the data from here:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

[vamsee]

Dear redmarkbully I understand your answer even iam not interested to re invent wheel but, I work in small island of Cyprus,the google map website doesnot even show in its program. We have only 4 big cities in here and I have already gathered helicopter photographs of this place that has some significance.

I just wanted to mark these places in the map and if some clicks on it have the same zoom effect as google maps and give a detailed photo with some description down. I dont need lanes, roads and stuff because the website is tourist based. I want to use PHP and Ajax for this purpose can you give me suggestions or sample scripts to start

[redbullmarky]

sure, i understand.
i edited my original post possibly whilst you were typing, to add a couple of links. the first one was my introduction to mapping, and gets the basics across very well. applying that to what you want should be easy enough. the tricky bit will come when it comes to tiling the pieces together and feeding them to the user. i'm not personally comfortable with this type of use of AJAX to advise, sorry.

hope that helps
cheers
Mark

[BrianPeiris]

There is a way to use the Google Maps API with your own custom map layer/tiles, for an example: [url=http://mapwow.com/]http://mapwow.com/[/url]
See the following links.
[url=http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/googlemaps/custommap.htm]http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/googlemaps/custommap.htm[/url]
[url=http://mapki.com/wiki/Add_Your_Own_Custom_Map]http://mapki.com/wiki/Add_Your_Own_Custom_Map[/url]

I really don't suggest trying to redo Google maps, it would be an immense amount of work to get all the logic down, let alone getting it to work in various browsers.

But... If you really want to, take a look at this:
[url=http://media.pragprog.com/titles/ajax/ajaxian_maps.pdf]http://media.pragprog.com/titles/ajax/ajaxian_maps.pdf[/url]

[BreakBreak]

I'm from cyprus too, if you download the latest google earth you will notice they have much of cyprus added and i'm guessing will finish it off in the next versions.