What's an easy to use API for plotting latitude/longitude pairs on a world map?

I have a list of 50000 latitude/longitude pairs and want to plot them on a map. I tried http://gsl开发者_开发百科-nagoya-u.net/appendix/software/worldmap/. It works but it seems to ignore the data after a certain point (less than 100). What else can I use to generate a static image? I'd rather not use Javascript.

Perl has GD::Map in CPAN which looks about right. I haven't used it myself to say for sure, but its the closest thing I could find based on your requirements.

You can use the google maps static image api, it has a 1000 images/day limit, but you could get it in 5 50 days. Script the creation of the links and save the resulting image.

Edit: Looks like I misread your total number of pairs. 50 days is quite a long time, perhaps there is some way to avoid this, otherwise maybe this won't be preferred.

You could look at MapServer. It's more of a complete GIS platform, so if you only need to do this one time, it is a bit of an overkill.

Someone else would have to tell you where to get baselayers, but you can render reasonable maps with QGIS.