(Please note that although this map is still live it is no longer being updated as the broadband project has moved on from this point. For more information about the project visit the Connecting Shropshire site.)
Our broadband embedded map provides Shropshire residents with information about estimated broadband speeds they can receive. This map gets used a lot and we have also been asked to provide some details about how it works, what better place to do this then the blog!
Our Ordnance Survey background mapping has been cached in an image format that speeds up various requests to the server to produce the image tiles the application requests. This improves loading time, panning and moving around the map as each tile is already available, removing the request for tiles to be created by the server. We have various cache setups depending on the requirements of the application. All our applications use a single background cache, in the good old days you had to have this as dynamic data.....this is what used to make mapping applications so slow as each tile in its native format is very large!
We then create a web service from the data and allow it to be consumed in various formats. WMS, KML, REST are some of the formats that we can offer for applications to use.
The ADSL data is different. This is dynamic data in a GIS format that the server can consume. We could also cache this data but usually it is subject to change or update so we set it to be requested and drawn by the server each time new data is being requested (opposite to the cache service above). We create the design or "symbology" of the data in a desktop application. The server replicates the layout we create, however this can be overridden by the application.
Once we are happy with the services we then go into development mode! Using a javascript API specific to our mapping application, we then consume the services and code the functions needed for the application. The application then gets embedded into the page.
We have a few of these applications across the Shropshire Council website and we are providing more and more each week! If you have any suggestions or feedback about the mapping applications we would like to hear from you!