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New Version of Bing AJAX Map is targeted for Mobile Devices

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Nov 23, 2010

Sections: Enterprise Architecture,; Architecture & Design,; Development
Topics: Ruby ,; Java ,; Dynamic Languages ,; Web 2.0 ,; .NET ,; Languages ,; AJAX ,; Google Maps ,; Programming ,; Enterprise Architecture ,; Bing Maps ,; Rich Internet Apps ,; Mashups

The new version of the Bing AJAX Map Control version 7 is one third the size of the previous version, a huge win for web sites that cater to mobile device users. Controls have been reduced in size and given HTML 5 support. There have also been performance improvements for multiple-point rendering.

AJAX isn’t the only way one can use Bing Maps. For those who want something more advanced there is there are also Silverlight controls. In addition one can build their own GUI by accessing the raw data using either the REST API or SOAP API.

For those who want an alternative to Bing Maps, Google continues to offer comparable features and performance. Google Maps includes an AJAX and a Flash version, as well as REST style web services.

When deciding which to use, customer experience means more than feature lists. After searching numerous blogs and newsgroups we really couldn’t find a clear winner. There was once interesting comparison between Google Maps and Bing Maps conducted by Earthware Limited. This was done in January, where they noted that Bing’s download size was significantly larger than Google’s. But since this new version cuts Bing down significantly, that should no longer be an issue.