Tech Tuesday: Loading GMaps Asynchronously On The Witness Hub

Submitted by Bevan Rudge on May 6, 2008 - 9:00am.

Last week the Witness Hub was updated with new enhancements and features -- most obviously, the Hub Map is now also on the home page!

Here is a video demonstration:

This feature required asynchronous loading of the Hub Map, including it's full-screen switcher and chunk marker loader code and features, on-load of the 'Map' tab (a Hub-customized version of jQuery tabs). In combination with the js-compressor for drupal 5, this enabled the Hub Map to sit alongside existing front page content without significantly impacting the page size, load time and bandwidth usage. In the next release we hope to further optimize front page loading time by loading Google's GMap2 API scripts asynchronously on tab load too, instead of in <head>.

This release has been long-winded and challenging for the Witness team at CivicActions. The development cycle for this release got postponed, convoluted and lost during Drupalcon Boston and other events and distractions. This release is also the most bug-fix and feature-packed of all the Hub's post-launch releases. (As a rough indicator, we've gone through 24 RCs / subversion tags while QAing and getting this release out the door. In the past 15 have usually been more than sufficient.)

The code for the features written for the Hub Map have been merged into Drupal's GMap module and contributed in several GMap module issues on d.o, which I'm maintaining centrally on node 238872.