Google Maps – The Worst of The Best

November 27th, 2007

As I promised I am working on my latest web app for release hopefully before the holidays. Not going into it too much it is a mashup of USPS and Google Maps.

This has been my first true mashup and it is like learning a whole new language, or several. For this I have had to learn the USPS API, Google Maps API and how to setup and use a proxy. This required the PEAR HTTP_Request to be installed on my server, actually easier than I thought. If you have cpanel you can just go to the php config and hit the button there and poof.

All this is good, I love learning these new things but I am also disappointed in the flexibility of some of them. After sometime without it Google released their geocoder object into the API. Now developers can pass it an address and get a longitude and latitude back – something you can actually plot on a map.

Before Google released this developers had to rely on geocoder.us for the longitude and latitude. In my experience this service is slower and less reliable. So using Google’s geocoder is great. BUT, it is somewhat inflexible and I haven’t yet fount a workaround for my problem. Without going into it too much now while it is unsolved and offers little value to you, I am having trouble passing variables resulting in a lack of info in the info box that pops up when you click on a marker on a map.

I have decided to move past this on the project and keep up my momentum because the info box is not a mission critical feature, but it is still pretty key, so I will get it figured before I tell you what this is all really about.

This project also gets me thinking, of course, about copyright and intellectual property. I promised to make this code OpenSource, well I need to figure out how to do this and remain my status in the project. That is for Another post.

Some Google Maps API Resources that have helped me: