GeoCommons Now with 100% Less "!" and 100% More Awesome!

If you’ve traveled to GeoCommons in the past day you may have noticed two old friends strangely missing. I’m referring to Finder! and Maker! specifically. This superficial change is indicative of more substantial changes that happened under the hood. For starters we have refactored our Ruby on Rails codebase, previously there were three Rails applications and now there is only one. We’ve also made significant improvements to the map as well, starting by adding better temporal animation (or Fourth Dimension Animation as I insist on calling it). You’ll notice you can render far more information without issue than before. Now animating across 10,000 points with a time attribute is easily possible. The most visible change to a regular GeoCommons user is our new homepage and navigation. You can now easily search, create maps and access your profile quickly from every page.

For developers there are the most new goodies. We have added to our JavaScript API, created a visualization API and improved upon our data storage and retrieval API as well. Let is not be said the Web still lacks thematic mapping API’s. Everything is documented in the Developer API portion of our documentation. Rather than sending you straight to the documentation here are a few highlights.

The JavaScript API allows full control over the features of a map. Want to create your own map builder on your own site? This is enabled through our built in authentication system. Need to animate a specific section of a dataset over time? You can do this through our JavaScript API as well. You can also add layers, remove, style and filter them to your specific application needs. If this doesn’t suit your needs the same features are available through REST as well. Create maps, datasets, update information and style all your map data to your exacting needs.  These new API features are mostly demonstrated through our documentation at the moment but look for new projects and examples on our GitHub Account soon.

The most exciting thing about this release is it enables some additional features we’ll be adding in the coming weeks as well. If you have any questions or suggestions head on over to our GetSatisfaction Page and let us know.  We hope your find our new features are useful as we do.  Excuse me now I have to go build a new mashup with all the new goodness.

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