dude, you rock. very cool.

Awesome tutorial. I’ve been passing this around to everyone. Would you be amenable to me linking to this article from our documentation? Let me know, thanks!

I am already using some of your ideas. I have been working representing directly shapefiles into Google Maps for Flash, check it out at http://biodivertido.blogspot.com/2008/06/displaying-shapefiles-in-google-maps.html.

But trying to represent the same shapefile directly as I do kills the player, so this is a no way. The main problem seems in reading the shapefile and generating the polygons on run time. In your way the polygons are already compiled and there is no need for parsing. Of course the biggest problem is that you can not dynamically load the polygons.

The other way I tried was using AMFPHP to send the polygons to the client, this is faster as the objects transfered does not need to be deserialized but it still far from being as fast as your solution. And the server suffers too…

I suppose that if I want to let users upload shapefiles to represent on the map I would have to take of these ways.

But still would be cool to have a repository of flex modules with different datasets, like yours, that developers could load at run time. That would probably be also fast.

In any case great post and great blog, thanks.