Virtual Earth Mobile Application System
Virtual Earth Mobile is an advanced application in the field of computers. When the Microsoft Networks Virtual Earth website was launched a few months ago, the first thing most of the people did was they tried it on the Windows Mobile device. This website was very advanced; it pushed the envelope of what you are allowed to do with a pure browser based application with the help of DHTML, AJAX and JavaScript. The Windows Media Application can access the Virtual Earth’s maps.
The working of the website is quite simple. There is no SDK, but through the Virtualearth.com, you can get the necessary information regarding how to use the Virtual Earth’s JavaScript control for displaying a map. The Virtual Earth servers can perform better as compared to the map tiles. They can carry out numerous flavors of searches. The most simple of all the searches is searching for a particular address.
For example, you consider a particular address string (e.g. “418 Hampster Avenue, Toronto, North York”) and then do the HTTP POST request to virtual earth server. You will receive a JavaScript string such as “SetViewport (latitude 1, longitude 1, latitude 2, and longitude 2). These four co-ordinates state a rectangle on the Earth where the address is being located. However, for a Street address as such, that is basically a point, a rectangle would not give any sense. Nevertheless, if you are searching for a particular location, you will surely require a rectangle. Thus, the Virtual Earth’s JavaScript function has a SetViewport Control that just requires you to evaluate the JavaScript string that cause the map control to display the rectangle as specified by the 4 co-ordinates.
Another type of search you can perform using this application is searching for a business. Supposing you are searching for the restaurants in Toronto, you need to do the similar type of HTTP POST request to virtual earth server. The only exception would be that now you will pass in restaurants and the four latitude and longitude co-ordinates will cover the area you wish to search and you will receive a string that contains up to 10 search results. Each search result will include the name of the business, its address, phone number, and latitude/ longitude. You will also get a Boolean that indicates if there are any more search results. If so, then you can make another request to see the next group of ten search results.
The new Virtual Earth Windows Mobile 5.0 has made it easier to add two novel features. The first being the “Find a Contact” which shows you the address out of your contact list and maps it. And the second feature is the GPS (Global Positioning System). This feature reads out your current position from the GPS device and maps it down for you.
You will find more about the Virtual Earth Mobile application, its source code, and its help file on the website. This application is absolutely free of cost; whereas the source code is under a Shared source License.
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