Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Haven't posted in a while - have had a number of projects keeping me busy. First and foremost is working on getting ready to move to our other house... some painting, carpeting, and other work going on... Add to this several other things that have been consuming bandwidth, such as some reorganizing at our office, a new computer (that still needs many things set up on it) and the upcoming elections...

But now the fun stuff - getting ready to embark on some upcoming web mapping projects.

Here, the dilemma was in how much of our project dollars we wanted to burn on mapping infrastructure. Customers were having a difficult time swallowing the 5-digit price tags and other baggage associated with ESRI products. As an alternative, a friend suggested ASPMap - which is a web mapping component that supports ASP and ASP.NET developed by VDS Technology.

I have been playing with the demo version, and am quite thrilled. At $449, it does quite a bit of what I want - multiple map layers, supporting ESRI Shapefiles, GeoTIFF, ECW; adjustable transparency of layers, scale-dependent renderers, thematic mapping, and ROUTING capability. My concern was in how robust the product is... I currently have a test application which has 6 layers and an ECW image, and the largest of the layers is 22MB, with a 19MB database file attached to it. Prior to loading, I generated a spatial index for the layer out of concern for speed, and after noting in the ASPMap documentation that it would use the indexes - the map images load up in milliseconds.

Great stuff... Now to see if I can also get some AJAX functionality working with the product. I am currently looking at msCross, which seeks to add Google-style AJAX functionality, along with WMS and WFS support to UMN Mapserver - can the same be done with ASPMap and other products?