In summer 2000 I started in the Field Service development team of Oracle’s eBusiness Suite (http://www.oracle.com/applications/service/srvonl_cont.html). The web form Dispatch Center contains four Java applets. One of them is a map. This map displays the location of the customers and the current position of the field service engineers who synchronize their mobile devices with a central database. The implementation of this map was quite problematic. Especially the performance caused severe headache. In 2005, five years and ten versions later, clicking the tab page of the map still was a receipt to freeze your application… then I saw Google Maps and I nearly fell from my chair. The performance is amazing. But also development work to integrate a map into an application is easy.

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