globe applet homepage

On this page: [download] [users] [release history]

This is an applet that displays a rotating map of the world on a web page.

It is free for use by anyone under a BSD-like license. This basically means that you can use it for anything you like, as long as you give me credit.

If you put it on your web page, I would be interested in knowing - please send a message to benc@hawaga.org.uk.

Features include:

• User configurable markers - put any number of markers anywhere on the world (for example, places you have been, places you want to go, capital cities, whatever...)
• Marker overlap detection and removal - if two markers would overlap on the globe, one of them is removed, at random.
• Configurable rotation speed and refresh rate.
• Hyperlinks from markers - a user can click on a marker to be taken to a relevant URL.
• Zoom in to any area of the map

Download

The most recent public release (v2.9) of globe is available for download: globepak-2.9.jar (version=2.9, November 2005, size=110k).
Unzip it into a subdirectory of your website and it should work straight away. The source code (size=43k) for v2.8 is available for download.

The (very old, incomplete) javadocs for the applet start here.

The land/sea outlines and some marker positions are taken from xearth.

Users of this applet

Travel maps have been produced by: myself, Alan. Andrew Smith used the applet in a research project to perform Text Mining.

Release History

v2.9, 2005-11-13

always plot city dots, even if we are not plotting their label location code tidying garbage collect forcibly to reduce jerkiness

v2.8, 2000-11-07

Incorporated changes supplied by Andrew Smith: Zooming, clickable rotation.

v2.7

User configurable rotation speed: user can now specify delay between each frame and the angle rotated between each frame.
The user can also specify the randomization characteristics for the markers: Markers can be randomized each frame (as for v2.6; default), randomized only at the start (if the globe is spinning fast, this looks better than the default), or not randomized at all (in which case, markers are drawn in the order that they are read from the config file). These properties are all specified with PARAM tags in the HTML source.
Improved status display - if no globe has been rendered yet, the applet area is used to display progress messages.
Double-buffering has been improved to reduce flicker when redrawing frames.
Hyperlink markers.

v2.6

First public release.