'Integrating' MapXtreme with Google/Bing Maps

Question

My company has a web application that appears to use MapXtreme in order to render it, and also uses MapMarker-USA to... retrieve the layers? We have MapInfo Pro as well, and I have no idea if that's doing anything.

Can anyone explain the differences between MapXtreme, MapMarker, and MapInfo?

Currently the application is using MapMarker 14, and MapXtreme 6.8, and I've been tasked with updating the servers running the application to use the updated versions of these programs.

One of my tasks is to improve the look of our application, and what I want to do is have the map application use either a Bing or Google map as the base layer, and our other information would appear on top of that as it has with the old base layer.

When MapXtreme 7.0 was released they were advertising 'full integration' with both Bing and Google's maps. But when looking for how to achieve this, there are no tutorials or examples that I can find. I've looked through the 7.0 release notes and developer guide, but there isn't anything relevant.

How would I go about this?

I'm really new to GIS and MapInfo products.

Answer 1

You asked about the differences between the three products:

• MapInfo MapXtreme is a .NET based SDK for building desktop and web applications, learn more
• MapInfo MapMarker is a geocoding engine that helps you transform addresses into spatial points, learn more
• MapInfo Pro is our desktop mapping product (GIS) for mapping, analysing and visualsing (spatial) data, learn more

These are very basic statements so I have added a link to a more comprehensive description of each of these products.

As for how to integrated tile server layers into MapXtreme, I found this in the release notes for MapXtreme 7.3:

Tile Server

MapXtreme supports the display of Tile Server TAB files created by MapInfo Professional. This allows you to open and view map tiles, such as Bing Maps and a Spatial Server MapTiling service from a MapXtreme desktop or web application.

Tiles are portions of maps that are stored on tile servers and on request, delivered as images to the client application for display. MapXtreme opens and displays tile images in the same way that it supports raster or WMS images. Images can be brought into MapXtreme as individual layers or as part of an .MWS workspace.

MapXtreme has built-in caching support for tiles for faster access of tile images. The cache is maintained during the session that the desktop or web application is open. You can also apply style overrides to Tile Server layers to control the translucency, brightness, contract and grayscale of the images, in the same way as you do for raster layers.

A Tile Server C# desktop sample application is available to help you gain more insight on how to use the tiling capability. It is located in \Samples\VisualStudio201x\Desktop\Features\TileServer under your MapXtreme 32-or 64-bit install directory.

For more information see Chapter 18: Working with Maps from Tile Server in the MapXtreme Developer Guide