When I need to create a geospatial visualization, Virtual Earth is my default answer. When talking to someone who's been in this space for a while, he mentioned the MapPoint Web Service. I initially assumed this was a legacy offering that Virtual Earth replaced. Apparently not. Tatham Oddie has a very nice high level comparison to at least help you determine which makes the most sense in a given situation.
| |
Virtual Earth |
MapPoint Web Service |
| Map Styles |
Road, Aerial, Birds eye |
Over 30 different styles (optimised schemes for night viewing, etc) however no aerial imagery |
| Integration style |
JS control (best for embedding in web pages) |
SOAP web service (usable anywhere) |
| Interface style |
Drag and drop positioning, scroll wheel support, interactive pushpins, AJAX based. |
Roll your own (it returns an image and you have to work out what to do with it). |
| Pushpin support |
You create them all yourself on the fly using API calls – any clustering / filtering optimizations have to be done manually. |
Can upload pushpin sets to their databases and they will handle plotting / clustering and filtering. |
| Routes |
Specify a start point and an end point and they’ll give you a route in text. End of story. |
Specify the waypoints, preferred road styles (back roads, highways, toll roads, non-toll roads) and it will return a machine readable result set. |
| Cost |
Free (commercial use has some minor restrictions) |
Per transaction |
| SDK documentation and support |
Basic MSDN docs, active community (www.viavirtualearth.com) |
Plenty of MSDN docs and articles, including VS.NET integrated help and plenty of websites (www.mp2kmag.com) |