The high level parts of the Lat49 client API have remained mostly the same, but the low level parts have changed greatly. Due to problems with map interactions through the ads and some cross-domain issues, IFRAMEs are no longer used to display ads. Instead, ads are created as DIVs in the application's domain using DHTML techniques. The largest changes have been to the Lat49.Ads class (Section 4.4), which has been totally rewritten. Publishers who choose to use the low level API methods will need to set up a callback function to handle the new ad DIV (as demonstrated in Example 4-1).
One of the consequences of moving the ad contents into the application domain is that the CSS script for the ads must be added there, as well. The script is normally set up automatically via the Lat49.initAds() method, however, publishers that do not call that method will have to fetch the CSS script themselves using the Lat49.fetchCSS() method, as documented in Section 4.1. Another consequence is that the lat49.js script depends on other CSS related scripts found on the server. Thus, it is now strongly recommended that the lat49.js script always be linked in from the Lat49 server, and not copied locally to the application server.
In this version, a new pushpin control panel is returned with the Lat49 ad. The panel includes two buttons: 'Map it' and 'Clear', which when pressed can be used to display the ad's location(s) via pushpins. The panel is only displayed when the pushpin attributes are defined (Section 4.5.4). Publishers will need to set up two callback function to handle the new pushpin feature (as demonstrated in Section 3.5 and Section 3.6).
Two additional examples have been added that demonstrate how to use the new pushpin feature with Google Maps API (Section 5.3) and Virtual Earth (Section 5.4).
There have been a couple of minor changes to some methods of the Lat49 object. The Lat49.getAdHelper() method takes an optional parameter specifying which stored object is to be returned. See the new Section 4.1 on the Lat49 object for more details.
This documentation has been augmented with a few more new sections (including this one) besides the one covering the Lat49 object. There is a section on making applications more robust against ad server inaccessibility (Section 3.7), and another on using ad debugging mode during testing (Section 4.5.2).