Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax From Novice to Professional by Michael Purvis
ISBN-13 : 9781590597071
ISBN-10 : 1590597079
In the Beginning. . .
In the history of the Internet, 2005?2006 will be remembered as the year when online mapping
finally came of age. Prior to 2005, MapQuest and other mapping services allowed you to look
up directions, search for locations, and map businesses, but these searches were limited, usually
to the companies the services had partnered with, so you couldn?t search for any location.
On February 8, 2005, Google changed all that. As it does with many of its services, Google quietly
released the beta of Google Maps to its Labs incubator (http://labs.google.com) and let
word-of-mouth marketing promote the new service.
By all accounts, Google Maps was an instant hit. It was the first free mapping service to
provide satellite map views of any location on the earth, allowing anyone to look for familiar
places. This started the ?I can see my house from here? trend, and set the blogosphere abuzz
with links to Google Maps locations around the world.
Like other mapping services, Google Maps offered directions, city and town mapping,
and local business searches. However, what the Google Maps engineers buried within its
code was something that quickly set it apart from the rest. Although unannounced and possibly
unplanned, they provided the means to manipulate the code of Google Maps to plot
your own locations. Moreover, you could combine this base mapping technology with an
external data source to instantly map many location-based points of information. And all of
this could be done on privately owned domains, seemingly independent of Google itself.
At first, mapping ?hackers? unlocked this functionality, just as video gamers hack into
games by entering simple cheat codes. They created their own mapping services using Google
Maps and other sources. One of the first these was Housingmaps.com, which combined the
craigslist.org housing listings with a searchable Google Maps interface. Next came Adrian
Holovaty?s chicagocrime.org, which offered a compelling way to view crime data logged by the
Chicago Police Department. These home-brewed mapping applications were dubbed ?hacks,?
since Google had not sanctioned the use of its code in external domains on the Web.
The major change came in June 2005, when Google officially introduced the Google Maps
API, which is the foundation for this book. By releasing this API, Google allowed programmers
the opportunity to build an endless array of applications on top of Google Maps. Hundreds of
API keys were registered immediately after the announcement, and many sites integrating
Google Maps appeared within days. The map mashup was born.
