Now that I'm back from my trip to India it would be a little odd to write retrospective blog posts on it; unfortunately both time and internet connectivity conspired against me writing any posts beyond the firsttwo. From what my friend had told me, I expected the internet connection to be limited, but its stoic unreliability meant that uploading photos or trying to write anything in Google Drive (my go-to place for writing) was all but impossible.
For expediency then, I'll gather together all the different media that I accumulated while there below. Right now, a day after I travelled back, I don't have much else to add.
The MapPoint service is a commercial offering by Microsoft which gives developers access to a wide variety of mapping functionality through a web service interface. Well that's how it used to be anyway. For a while MapPoint was just a web service and a technology that powered products like Autoroute, then for a while it became Microsoft Virtual Earth which did nothing apart from change what appeared on the map images that you loaded from the servers. Then Microsoft launched their Bing extravaganza which meant that it's now called Bing Maps - well it is when one logs into the control panel but the service is still called MapPoint. It's highly confusing and makes it intensely difficult to find what one wants on the Microsoft site, especially on plumbing the depths of MSDN. For the purposes of this diatribe however, MapPoint is a web service that uses the SOAP protocol.
the process could fail catastrophically, mostly due to the abject bloody-mindedness of the MapPoint service
SOAP and PHP have not always been the most accommodating of bedfellows, it wasn't until version five that PHP had the language constructs to support SOAP (namely XML and Objects) and even now they're not exactly seamlessly integrated. Version four of PHP relied upon pure-PHP to manage SOAP, while five introduced a dedicated extension and related classes. The classes themselves are basic, and lamentably the Zend Framework concentrates more on serving SOAP content than consuming. In short, talking to the MapPoint service using PHP is a pain and fraught with problems - most predominantly is that MapPoint is a service built with .NET in mind (indeed the service was originally called MapPoint .NET), PHP just happens to be supported through the open-standard nature of the protocol.