PHP – did anyone ever find out what this actually was an acronym for? “Personal Home Page” or “PHP Home Page” or something else? I actually did some PHP back when it was like version 2 and there was some HUGE security hole for hackers to take over your site. I really thought it was going to die because of JSP, so I stopped using it but I did enjoy using it. It lives on. I digress. Anyway, I know there are quite few PHP developers out there who love Bing Maps, but love their PHP. And, our Bing Maps MSDN documents don’t necessary bode well for trying to convert C# to PHP. Well, thanks to the Microsoft Interoperability Team we now have a PHP Toolkit for Bing Maps Web Service. It’s not officially supported by the product group, so don’t cry to me because it doesn’t work the way you want it to…cry to the team who made the PHP Toolkit for Bing Maps Web Service. :) You could also thank them for saving you days of development and most of the hair on your head.
Per the description, “This project demonstrates how PHP applications can take advantage Microsoft's Virtual Earth. The Virtual Earth API is exposed through a Javascript library making it straightforward to integrate into any web based application. The project integrates Microsoft's Virtual Earth Web Service and API to embed a map into a PHP application. Web site users can add their location to the map and the map displays a pin for every user location stored in the database. The solution package includes the code needed to embed a Virtual Earth map in a PHP web page. Step by step instructions are included to help PHP developers set up a database and appropriate table to store user submitted locations. Separate instructions are provided for SQL Express 2005/2008 and MySQL users.”
After looking at some of the documents, the toolkit looks very solid. It’s actually quite nice to see others building out Bing Maps interfaces to support the general developer community. We could use some good Java / JSP samples…anyone? Maybe some Cocoa or Python? I had to ask.
If you’re a PHP developer wanting to develop with Bing Maps, I think I just made your day.
CP
