Bing Maps announced today that it’s added two new modules for the Bing Maps V7 API as well as some updates to a couple of existing modules. Till now, there were 15 different modules available for the Bing Maps V7 API, all of which were developed by the Bing Maps community and shared as a way to hasten the process of cooking up some maps.
The first module, the GeoJSON Module, was developed by Brian Norman of Earthware, Ltd, a UK-based company that specializes in developing interactive web-based maps. As entailed from the name, the module will allow developers to import GeoJSON files into Bing Maps. GeoJSON is an encoding format used for depicting geographical structures in JavaScript Object notion (see where the JSON comes from now?). JSON is generally more compact than XML when it comes to storing human-readable geographic data, so this will allow some developers to conserve their memory resources.
The second module introduced today is the Well Known Text Reader/Writer Module. This module was created by Ricky Brundritt, a EMEA Bing Maps Technology Solution Professional. According to Brundritt’s post on Bing Maps blog, he made this module because there wasn’t an any available module that allowed for quick visualization of Well Known Text on Bing Maps. “When reading Well Known Text data it is parsed into Bing Maps shapes; MultiPoint, MultiLinstring, MultiPolygon and GeometryCollection are turned into an EntityCollection of shapes,” he wrote. “To write Well Known Text simply pass in a Bing Maps shape and the Well Known Text equivalent will be returned.”
Two of the existing Bing Maps modules that were updated are the GeoRSS Module, which enables sharing of spatial data as a syndication feed, and GPX Module, which makes it easier to view GPX files (typically used by GPS devices) to be viewed on Bing Maps.
The two new modules can be download from today’s Bing Maps blog post; the previous 15 modules are available over at the Bing Maps V7 Modules website.