Modern Technologies in Client-Server Architecture for Geo-based Interactive Web Portals

The internet is an unlimited growing and most comfortable information and communication base. In this context, web portals on the internet play an important role created for combining communication facilities and information data bases. An increasing number of portals involve web-based map applications to integrate geographic information for the representation of economical and other records. Web-based map applications are typically designed in a client-server architecture. Different solutions exist using especially HTML and JavaScript, Flash or Java applets. We discuss these possibilities and point out an alternative solution. Particularly, we show how to use Java Applet Technology and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) in this field. Finally, we report about our results as a complete, flexible map service solution which is available on the internet. An adapted kind of solution will be used by a geo-based marketing portal for offering information about the economic situation, social and cultural aspects and natural facts of regions to support joint-ventures inside the European Union.