Seven scripts in seven days - Day #5
While one use of scripting is to enhance the Editor's built-in functionality, another important use is for interoperability with other programs or services. A number of the scripts are designed to make the Editor interact with Google or Bing map services, or demonstrate how this is done.
MapTiles
MapTiles, also known as
WebTiles, is a core technology for web map services (and
Google Earth). The technology stores a whole map as a pre-computed image pyramid. Reading a map prepared in this way is very fast because the map has already been pre-rendered.
The
MapTiles script creates image pyramids that are compatible with
Google Maps, Bing Maps, and
OpenLayers. When you publish such a map on one of these services, your map will appear on the top of the Google/Bing content. As usual, a valid coordinate system set-up is required.
Furthermore, this script generates a
.ttkwp file, so that the generated map tiles can also be opened in any
TatukGIS product as a layer from the hard drive. So, if you have a very large or complicated, but rarely modified, base map, generating it to
WebTiles can be a good idea (to achieve top performance).
Google Maps - all layers exported
Bing Maps - only vector layer exported