Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Introduction to Google Maps - Part 1

I will give a birds eye view of Google Maps

Google Maps is one of the most popular APIs released by Google. Technically it is called as Geo Spatial Viewing Tool. You can use the API and embed these maps into your website / blog etc., With the huge success of this API, other players like Microsoft, Amazon followed. It even made AJAX popular !!

Google Maps is the first public API, I have worked with. The API is every easy learn - APIs are meant to be that way ;). FYI Google Maps is free to use.

What is Google Maps?
Google Maps provides a highly responsive, intuitive mapping interface with embedded, detailed street and aerial imagery data. In addition, map controls can be embedded in the product to give users full control over map navigation and the display of street and imagery data.

How to use Google Maps ?
We need to register with google here you will get a API Key, which you need to use in every Map you make.

A Typical Map looks like this. We have a Marker, Info Window, Zoom / unZoom & Direction control on the map.

There are lots of possiblities with this API. Many use this API as a part of his/her Mashup.

Next part : We will look on how to create a map and add Markers to it, with map.

No comments:

Post a Comment