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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T07:23:33+00:00

I am developing a web application that is supposed to display land traffic in

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I am developing a web application that is supposed to display land traffic in real time in any part of the world. For a couple months I’ve been developing it using JavaScript and OpenLayers (http://www.openlayers.org) framework.

Unfortunately, this solution appears to be inefficient. There are hundreds (200-300) of objects on the map that are updated every couple minutes. The sheer operation of refreshing and rendering them takes significant amount of time that makes the
application less usable (slow responsivity to user actions).

At the moment I am considering changing the technology. Adobe Flex seems to be the most reasonable solution. There is at least one application written in it that does similar things to mine (http://casper.frontier.nl/).

However, I have a couple of concerns regarding Flex:

  • can it be easily integrated with the
    HTML/CSS/JavaScript based part of the
    application (for example, the
    graphical interface should be
    coherent when it comes to styles and
    colors)?
  • I get an impression that
    with latest browsers (mainly Chrome
    9.0) JavaScript and CSS becoming more efficient. What are the chances that
    in a couple of months JavaScript+CSS
    will make it possible to implement
    efficient, flash-like rich internet
    application? (A note is needed here:
    famous Canvas tag is not a solution
    for my problem, at least not for now.
    Rendering objects on map with canvas
    proved to be less efficient than with
    traditional SVG because the size of
    the canvas is really big – a whole
    browser window)
  • What are the chances
    that Flash technology will be
    abandoned (Apple policy, HTML5
    growing support etc.) in
    not-so-near-future (a couple of
    years)?
  • There is a possibility that my client would like to view this application on mobile devices, including iPhone.
  • Any other solution for web-based interactive maps?

Can anybody address these issues?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Lazy comment repost:

    I’ve used Google Maps JavaScript API + a custom canvas tile layer (see here and here) to draw maps with 10k+ markers, really quickly. Perhaps you just need to rethink your particular approach rather than totally rewriting your maps.

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