In this chapter, we will design and start building a complete turnkey mapping application. While our example application might seem somewhat specialized, the process of designing and implementing this application, and much of the code that we use, will apply to all sorts of mapping applications that you might like to write yourself.

Due to the complexity of the application we're creating, we will split the implementation across two chapters. In this chapter, we will lay the groundwork for the mapping application by:

In the following chapter, we will implement the map tools that let the user enter and manipulate map data, edit attributes, and calculate the shortest path between two points.