6 Answers

• I also have a need for something like this.. but the points on my maps are fairly static. I was planning on handling this on a web page. But was thinking that using some kind of json file to create a map would also be an option. I would just refresh the JSON file from the web.
  I was also going to use DRUPAL as my backend JSON and/or web server.

• I have a similar situation. I have decided to limit the number of pins for each query. So I do SELECT … LIMIT 200. It seems like the map view can handle a lot of pins, just not adding a lot at a time. Are you seeing the same thing, or does the performance suffer for you just by having a certain number of pins present period?

  I also allow the user to jump to another location at any time, and when I do that I call removeAllAnnotations() first so the old ones at the previous location are not kept in memory, just in case the number of pins present does affect the performance. If the user pans the map around I do add new ones as they go, but don't remove the old ones.

  I'd like some help in this area too, to improve map view performance.

• This isn't a solution but you can see how clustering annotations would look. Toward the bottom you'll see DTClusterMaker.

  http://www.drobnik.com/touch/parts-store/

• I have this issue too, I have over 900 POI's and its growing, adding markers on the map severely slows the device, removing the animations speeds up the process slightly, but still not good enough, I have got around it by only showing some of the markers at a time, they can be split by who owns them. But its not an ideal solution, I would much rather see a Titanium implementation of marker clustering.
  Especially as a webview, whilst would work, doesn't have tight integration with passing data from a SQLite db, which is how I have stored my data.

  However, if anyone has a working example they could share it would be so much appreciated, either via webview or native maps.

• The problem of many Pins on a map exist on any client. Javascript, mobile of desktop. The only efficient way to handle this is to incorporate the pins as pixels on the map tiles themselves.

  If the limit is 200, 900 or as I experienced with JavaScript: 16000 is somewhat dependent on the device, gfx cpu and the amount of ram.

  If one needs to many pins on a map, setting these with the client will eventually slowly and steadily kill your app.

  If google offers layering with pixels in the bitmaps I am not certain about, but the tileserver we use in our company does. We used ESRI and put the pins on the tiles using layered maps on the ESRI server. I am not certain if the map functions in appCelerator supports this, but I am pretty certain the webView does.

  Annotations are added on the client only for the pins visible in the display, limited to an amount which one safely can assume the client can handle.

  I offer no solutions here, but adding more than a limited number of pins in a map on the client will eventually lead to a grinding halt on your device…

• The only right solution is to use a clustering. In the web google map api world are lot of solutions. In relation of zoom level (in our world = region) a part of markers (in our world = annotations) will suppressed displaying of superfluouses annotations. There are a lot of rules to do this.

  What we need is a annotations manager. It collects teh annotations and controls displaying of annoations.

  Any ideas?