Slashgeo

New Open Source Utility Library for the Google Maps API

posted by Satri on Monday March 26, @09:07AM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the between-do-not-eveil-and-commercial-offers dept.

The Geowanking mailing list tells us Google has opened parts of the Google Maps API for open source development. From the announcement: "Another reason for this open source project is that we've realized that there are many potential extensions for the Google Maps API, but that the common user still needs a reliable and quick-loading API. Adding custom controls/functionality to the core API adds to the file size and forces developers wanting to tweak the code to overwrite obfuscated JS functions. With this open source project, a developer can include the JavaScript file for the particular library they're interested in. They can even download a copy of it and tweak it for their use."

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• Umm OpenLayers anyone?

  (Score:3, Interesting)

  by lxnyce (1043) on Monday March 26, @10:30AM (#1351)
  ( http://www.vizure.com/ )

  Time for a conspiracy theory. Does this seem like an attempt by Google to maintain their GMaps dominance by "stealing" developers from OpenLayers. There has been a lot of great activity going on in the OpenLayers community, targetted towards GIS users. It just seems like Google can't keep up, so they are forced to open up their script source to the public...which is not a bad thing per say. I wonderred why they re-released that KML support announcement in GMaps the other day. My suspicion is that they saw the work the OpenLayers team was doing. They probably seen some of the vector editing support they are adding (which feed back directly into GeoServer), and figured thats the quickest way to add the support to their non GIS based API. On the other hand, you have Openlayers(http://www.openlayers.org/) which is built around GIS. It has things like native WMS support which is huge imho. Vector Editing : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/editingtool bar.html [openlayers.org] Basic KML : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/kml-layer.h tml [openlayers.org] Web Cam Hooks : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/webcam.html [openlayers.org] WFS Vector : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/wfs-states. html [openlayers.org] Support for Google/VE/Yahoo/Etc... maps : http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/baseLayers. html [openlayers.org] I have no affiliation with OpenLayers outside of using it. It's truly a great open API.
  • Re:Umm OpenLayers anyone?

    (Score:3)

    by Satri (3) on Monday March 26, @11:14AM (#1353)
    ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )

    I also like OpenLayers a lot. I wonder if Google and other proprietary data providers through APIs could somehow stop OpenLayers from loading their tiles?

    [ Parent ]