My notes while working through Matt Sidor's excellent course "Creating Custom Web Maps" taught online at Udemy.

• Creating Custom Web Maps

Section 1: Unit 3 – About the Author

• Matt Sidor, Web developer and designer.
• Currently works at UC Davis Energy Conservation Office.
• Working on web maps to track energy use of campus buildings. Cool project. Wonder if we are doing some similiar at UCLA.
• Personal website
• Twitter: @mattsidor
• good teacher

Section 1: Unit 4 – Brief history of web maps

History of web maps runs from 1993 to now. Web maps, compared to ARCGiS a desktop app, have 20 years of history and developer APIs have been around for 10 years.

Here are some key dates and names.

1993

• Xerox Parc Map Viewer
• Created by Steve Putz
• Ran on Perl, CGI, and served maps as GIF images

1996

• MapQuest
• first to serve point to point directons and printable route maps

2005

• Google Maps launches
• First to server "slippy" web maps
• Used AJAX a combination of JavaScript and XML
• First with aerial and satellite imagery
• Street maps for accuracy
• First web map with a developer API

2006

• OpenLayers
• First open source map service
• Wide variety of GIS data sources and map projections

2007

• Cloudmade
• created by founder of OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast
• First to focus on geo-enabled applications and data from OpenStreetMaps

2011

• Leaflet launches
• Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps
• side project of Cloudmade employee Vladimir Agafonkin
• fast and lightweight JavaScript library
• currently most popular mapping platform for web developers