Fast display of data in a map

Recently the HTML5 bandwagon has gained a lot more traction, and I'm going to develop a prototype for a map with fast client-side drawing on top of it, using some of the goodies that HTML5 provides us.

The basic idea is:

• Bing Maps or Leaflet mapping-wise
• Html5 Canvas to draw the data (points, heatmaps, grids, whatever)
• Html5 websockets to fetch the data
• NodeJS to create an ultra-fast server to return the data to the client (without HTTP protocol overhead, just a plain TCP socket).
• MongoDB to handle the data.

Also, I want to be able to handle thousands (if not millions) of coordinates at once.

There are some variants that I would like to try, particularly:

• Fetch all data to client-side vs fetch only the visible data incrementally.

• Use the Leaflet CanvasLayer vs a "manual" canvas on top of the bing maps div.

Also:

• MongoDB spatial indexes
• The server requests with/without throttling
• Use Map/Reduce on MongoDB to minimize the data transfer / processing.
• Fast algorithms to handle the data on javascript.

I'll soon write some posts on the subject.