I was giving a presentation at an ESRI gathering hosted in reading at Microsoft this week, talking about all things Silverlight and MapIt, and very little unsurprisingly about the Flex API. During a presentation about the Web API’s I mentioned JavaScript and Silverlight as two offerings that whilst can do similar things, need to be considered carefully in relation to the audience in questioning and the tasks they wish to perform. Now I like the Silverlight API and as I mentioned in the talk it can really allow for the avoidance of browser support pain by abstracting away the layer between your...

As you can see I’m not one for short posts, but sometimes a great article needs to be pimped. Smashing Magazine has lots of those and whilst I’m mostly a Web Developer and not a Web Designer (I do have an iPhone so there may be hope for me) it’s good to keep an eye on the current design trends for web applications. Smashing, super, great, well not so great with IE6. Their current article “CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8” is a change from the normal rant at Microsoft fare, but aims at understanding all the differences that occur in the Microsoft browser segment of the market...

Before you read on this isn’t a post devoted to image caching. This is a post about data caching in general with image caching being an extreme form of data caching. It comes from a bit of work I did recently caching data from a tracking feed. It’s based around why you want to cache, what data you might need to cache and how you might cache (I used .NET but you can do it in all major web development languages). Caching has often been the premise of web sites that want to be, and I’m using a technical terms here, ‘screamingly fast’ and not ‘snail slow’. Caching before caching was...

To celebrate the upgrading of the JavaScript API to 1.5 I decided to have a little play with adding a where are you from page to the site (you can get too it from the page link above). This is a little routine to take your IP address and geo-locate where you are. It’s a very simple application in the style of Al Pascual’s Map Stats Silverlight application that you can get here. In fact it’s almost the same, except it works with Dojo uses a different IP geolocator from IPInfoDB as the one used by Al didn’t know places like New Zealand existed. It was an interesting application to write, not...