Geographical Heat Map

[Veign]

Anyone know of anything around that lets me create, and manage, a heat map of the world.  Its has to be an online solution that I can host locally on a web server - Google Map solution preferred.

The way I see it working is the map, or code, makes calls (Ajax) to the database to retrieve values for a square being viewed and displays a heat map overlay on the view.  Some initial settings determine values corresponding to colors.

Anyone know of anything around?

edited: Should note that this is for a PHP / MySQL project.

[tinjaw]

My list of things bookmarked "for future study" on this topic are...

gheat - Project Hosting on Google Code
HeatMapAPI.com - Home
Density Mapping in Google Maps with HeatMapAPI « GeoChalkboard
Create a Heat Map with Your Own Data (& Embed on Your Site!)

[Veign]

Those are the same ones I've come acroos.
HeatMapAPI looks great but costs a fortune and not possible for a high traffic website. 
gHeat is in Python - not something I've dealt with before and time is not on my side to learn.
http://imagine-it.or...google/geoiqmap.html - Doesn't work anymore and references HeatMapAPI
And the last references HeatMapAPI.

Hard to believe that HeatMapAPI is the only option, that no one else has done this before.

[Veign]

Found this guy:
http://maps.forum.nu/

Looks promising.

[tinjaw]

Doh! How'd I miss that. I have that in my bookmarks.

[Veign]

I contacted him and hopefully he'll respond.

[tinjaw]

IIRC that person has posted to the Google Maps group several times and has said that the code he has posted there is free for your use. Maybe search the old v2 and the current v3 API groups for links to that stuff.

[Veign]

Its free but you can't see the code that is happening behind the scenes.  So I don't know what the processing happening in the background is expecting and what's passed back.

I'm going to wait and see if he responds.  If not I'll try and dissect the code.