Matt Berseth

In the original article, I showed an example of plotting zip-code boundaries using Microsoft Virtual Earth and Ajax.Net.  I received some feedback from John (SoulSolutions) suggesting that the transmission of latitude and longitude points could be optimized by using googles compression algorithm (described here) which exploits that fact that lat/lons can benefit from compression when there is little difference between adjacent lat/longs within a given sequence.  I thought this was an interesting suggestion so I updated the example to include this compression algorithm.  Here is the rundown of the changes that I made:

1. The ZipCodeService now returns an encoded string of lat/lons instead of the original format that had the individual lat/lons comma separated and the pair pipe separated
2. The ZipCode.js file now contains a routine that decodes the result from the ZipCodeService and builds a VELatLong array from the decoded points
3. I pulled over the javascript/C# source provided by John for encoding/decoding the points. 

Download Code

I used fiddler to check-out the difference in the payloads between the 4 sample zip-code datasets I was using - here are the results. 

Here is a sample transmission for the 32224 zip-code

Encoded Transmission

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 13:52:50 GMT
Content-Length: 260

"w~`xDf{dpNSsq@cQkdA??rIcBjW{YvQgYrIiY~dAsDcGhJbGzJzYk\\fJrIoFfJfYjMrSzTRgTgT_NkH{Tv[wLnKoA??RdkAjnAe@?vVni@i@rX}HnFoFbLkRkCkH??vV_D~a@rI??Sve@v|AeB??fr@hh@vBzh@s{@ncCzTr`AcrA`t@k\\d`@sIn}@f@l_@fEdV??oeBzOs]nPwj@rb@ka@z@_DalJ~p@iHvLw`@kW{Eox@{@ksAf@_eAbGo_@{J"

Un-encoded Transmission

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 13:51:36 GMT
Content-Length: 1066

"30.2582, -81.4721|30.3206, -81.4586|30.3207, -81.4505|30.3236, -81.4394|30.3236, -81.4394|30.3219, -81.4389|30.318, -81.4346|30.315, -81.4304|30.3133, -81.4262|30.3021, -81.4253|30.3034, -81.4271|30.3021, -81.429|30.2978, -81.4243|30.296, -81.426|30.2972, -81.4278|30.293, -81.4301|30.2897, -81.4336|30.2896, -81.4302|30.293, -81.4278|30.2945, -81.4243|30.2899, -81.4221|30.2879, -81.4217|30.2879, -81.4217|30.2878, -81.4339|30.2751, -81.4337|30.2751, -81.4375|30.2683, -81.4373|30.2642, -81.4357|30.263, -81.4345|30.2609, -81.4314|30.2616, -81.4299|30.2616, -81.4299|30.2578, -81.4291|30.2522, -81.4308|30.2522, -81.4308|30.2523, -81.437|30.2373, -81.4365|30.2373, -81.4365|30.2291, -81.4431|30.2285, -81.4498|30.2382, -81.471|30.2347, -81.4815|30.248, -81.49|30.2527, -81.4953|30.2544, -81.5053|30.2542, -81.5105|30.2532, -81.5142|30.2532, -81.5142|30.2696, -81.5169|30.2745, -81.5197|30.2815, -81.5254|30.287, -81.5257|30.2878, -81.4673|30.2798, -81.4658|30.2776, -81.4604|30.2815, -81.4593|30.2907, -81.459|30.3042, -81.4592|30.3154, -81.4605|30.3206, -81.4586"