Well it seems, despite the megabucks budget, Limerick Corporation have failed to deliver a basic mapping application to service their planning application systems. If they’d paid an Limerick IT (or LRTC to us old skool boyz) student a hundred quid to integrate the Google Maps API, they’d have better served their target audience. However, once again, the “if it costs more, it must be better” principle prevailed. The broken system seems to be powered by Proteus, who belong in the last decade, judging by their website, or, at best, not in the web services sector.

What’s wrong with it? Well for starters, it’s IE-only, and not alone that, but it relies on a custom ActiveX control. Early 90s technology for a public service body? I appreciate that Web 2.0 is a bit of a marketing fad, but there are some “ways and means” of doing things on the web which are well established practices, and ActiveX is not one of them. It’s not rocket science, but no doubt Proteus proclaimed it was, for a fee.