Google Maps Hacks

Chapter 2. Introducing the Google Maps API

Hacks 10–16: Introduction

The Google Maps site at http://maps.google.com is awesome, with an easy user interface, one-box searching, and integrated satellite imagery. But it gets better! The Google Maps team has made it possible to include Google Maps with almost all of its great features onto your own web pages. They have done this by providing an open Application Program Interface, or API.

An API defines a standard way for one program to call code that lives within another application or library. The Google API defines a set of JavaScript objects and methods that you use to put maps on your own web pages.

Before Google Maps, it was much harder to put simple maps on your own pages. MapQuest had a program that let you create a link to a map. You could not embed the map on your own page, you could not put it into a frame, you couldn’t even use Target=_new to open a new browser window.

There were—and are—open source solutions to generate maps. For example, the UMN Mapserver (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu) is very powerful, allowing you to do things that Google Maps cannot yet equal, but there is a rather steep learning cliff. There are also industry standards for web mapping promulgated by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

The OGC-defined Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) standards define a powerful web services interface to geospatial data. There are now free and easy-to-use open source ...