Today I created a new Meetup group for Spatial / Location Developers in Los Angeles.

Here is the group description:

The Los Angeles Spatial / Location Developers Group is for software developers working with any spatial or location enabled platforms. The group aims to be platform and vendor neutral.

Some of the technologies we may discuss include ESRI, Google Maps, Bing Maps, the OSGeo stack, Open Street Map, SimpleGeo, and Social Location APIs from Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Twitter, Facebook (forthcoming), etc.

All levels of developers are welcome, from seasoned GIS professionals to those new to geospatial or mobile location development.

As this is a new group we will be actively looking for creative input on the direction and focus that members want to see.

Meetup groups organize online and then meet face to face for real world interaction. I've been participating in other groups recently and found them to be fun and helpful. I’m hoping this Meetup group will grow into a place for geospatial and location developers to interact and learn from one another.

If you are in the Los Angeles area and are interested in geospatial or location development, please join the group at:

http://www.meetup.com/laspatial/

If you’re not in LA but know someone here who might be interested, please pass the word along. And if you're really inspired, start a spatial / location developers Meetup group in your own city!

This thread on the Google Maps API for Flash Group Forum caught my attention yesterday:

• Pure AS3 setup of Google map via Flash Develop

The author outlines the steps required to get FlashDevelop up and running with the Google Maps API for Flash. FlashDevelop is a free and open source IDE with code completion for ActionScript, MXML, XML, and HTML.

It provides a compelling alternative to FlexBuilder and is worth a look. Please donate to the project if you use it!

I followed the steps outlined in the thread and everything worked as described. Here are a few extra details that might be useful:

• The FlashDevelop home page is www.flashdevelop.org
• I had to download and install the Java Runtime Environment before installing FlashDevelop.
• When installing the Flex SDK, place it in C:\Program Files\FlashDevelop\Tools\flexsdk for automatic configuration
• If you don’t already have the Flash Debug Player, download and install the latest version from Adobe

Hope this helps!

Overview

This is the third post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. The first and second posts presented and refined an example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. This post demonstrates how to display an ArcGIS Server cached tile layer as a custom map type with the Google Maps API for Flash.

Sample Application Concepts

The sample application works as follows:

• The Google Maps API for Flash is embedded in a Flex 3 application.
• A cached tile layer representing Land Base features for Portland, Oregon is served via an ArcGIS Server Map Service, accessible via ArcGIS Server’s REST API.
• The cached tile layer appears as a custom map type in the Google Maps API for Flash User Interface.
• The cached tile layer is displayed at zoom levels 0 - 19.

Here are a couple of screen shots of the sample application. The first shows the application with the custom “Land Base” map type selected. The second shows the application with the normal map type selected.

Live example is here, and source code is here. More...

Overview

This is the second post in a series where I discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash. If you haven’t read the first post yet, I encourage you to do so now.

The first post presented a simple example that demonstrated how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this second post, we will reorganize the code for better reusability and add some geocoding functionality.

I’ll keep this post pretty brief and only cover the major points. Feel free to check out the live example and dive into the source code! More...

Overview

This is the first post in a series where I will discuss techniques for interacting with the ArcGIS Server REST API from within a Flex 3 application built with the Google Maps API for Flash.

With this post, we start with a simple example that demonstrates how to stream features from ArcGIS Server and overlay them on top of Google Maps data. In this case, we will be working with parcel data.

This first example serves to demonstrate the basic concepts as succinctly as possible. In future posts, I will gradually refactor and improve upon the code to create reusable components. More...