Posted by kevinwalsh on May 24, 2006 at 6:13am
I'm about to launch a site with a gmap.module/location.module node map, but all of a sudden my map/node page broke. My Firefox status bar tells me it's either "Connecting to www.acme.com..." or "Waiting for www.google.com...", but then it times out and produces a map without any markers, where there used to be 60.
Apparently i'm not the only one having problems. [zacker.org/mapdev/: as of 1am Wed May 24, no markers appear there either].
this makes me wonder about the longterm stability of using gmap macros. any ideas?
Comments
What is happening...
What the gmap.module does is simply provide an easy interface for writing the Google Map API javascript. It is not stable or unstable in itself.
The problem that is being experienced now is that acme.com (who provided and hosts the clusterer.js file) is down. This problem can be eliminated by providing a local copy of the js file, or by turning clusterer.js off.
If you have clusterer.js turned on then it looks in the misc directory and if clusterer.js (well actually the complete script name) is there it will load it from there, if not it will try and load it from acme.com (BTW, I asked permission to do this and he said he didn't have a problem with drupal users loading the js from his server)
A similar problem can happen when the Google Map server is having a problem (this rarely causes complete failure, but frequently causes some slow-down of page loading.) This problem is inherent in the Google Maps API.
Hopefully that gives some explanation as to what is happening.
Thanks for detailed explanation
webgeer,
Makes perfect sense now.
I took a look at the ACME Labs Freeware License which is a modified version of the BSD license. The Acme web site states:
So, to avoid the variable of acme.com (who provided and hosts the clusterer.js file) being down, wouldn't it make sense to load the clusterer.js file onto one's server? Of course, the variable of the Google Map server having a problem would still exist.
Thanks.
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
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great, i'll move the js
great, i'll move the js fiile over. thanks for the details! Since the acme.com server was down last night, i was having trouble even finding info about it.
kevin
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