The Fusion Tables Archive is an easy way to preserve existing maps generated with Google Fusion Tables. It is a project by Google realized at Ubilabs.

An Node.js Express server running on AppEngine provides the export functionality. This server will export each selected Fusion Table to its own spreadsheet or CSV file “archive” in your Google Drive.

Exported datasets can be visualized on a Google Map. Its goal is to show that the exported data is save and looks similar to the original Fusion Tables dataset. Handling large datasets with thousands of entries and complex shapes was critical. This was achieved using deck.gl.

All the code of the exporter and the visualizer parts are open sourced.

My Role

I planned the architecture and built the server with Express, a Node.js framework. The export works completely without client side JavaScript to ensure that every user can export their data, no matter how old the browser is.

The visualizer part was implemented by me based on the previous work of Google and Uber to integrate deck.gl with Google Maps. It works as a static page, passing the data as URL parameters around. The goal was to provide a way to reuse the code for custom implementations and to prevent further lock-ins.

Impressions