Hi, I'm building an online map service for a small community (ca 3 kmē).
The map should only contain this specific area and will have drawn graphics (not satellite pictures). The houses should have ok resemblence but don't have to be identical. Each household will get a login so that they can build a mini-site of their own which will be displayed in a box (iframe or whatever) when you click on their house.
The map needs to have a 2-3 level zoom and panning and I want to be able to easily modify the shapes of houses, roads, park areas, or add more houses as there are some construction jobs taking place which will produce new til houses next year. A very important issue for the map service and the site is that it has high cross-browser compability.
I hope the above description is enough to help guide my choice of technique.
In an optimal situation I would be very used to Flex and Ajax and thus I could make that choice myself but as it is I am not (though I am an experienced programmer). Since I have little time I only have time to learn one of the techniques and thus I cannot do small-scale tests to see which technique is better suited.
What attracts me with Ajax is the speed of i.e. Google Maps, but can I build my stand-alone map from their API or will I have to integrate it within the Google World Map? Also, do they support the above described user-generated content or will I have to build my own mini-version of Google Maps using Ajax and if so, isn't that a world of pain considering cross-browser compability?
What attracts me with Flex is that it only demands that the user has Flash installed and then it's rock n' roll (no browser or OS issues). A downside of Flex is that I have never done any database handling in it (I work with PHP,MySQL and MS SQL on a daily basis) and I don't know how good support is for such dynamics.