Hacking Google Maps

Introduction

Do you know where you are?
Do you know where you are going?
Could you find the nearest restaurant to your current location?
When you looked at your latest holiday photos, could you remember where you were?
It is just these sorts of questions that drove me to write this book. I’m interested in the answers to all of these questions, and particularly in ways in which I can represent information about my world, and the world we live in, in a way that relates that data to its location.

During the course of writing this book I visited New York (U.S.), Edinburgh (Scotland), and Sorrento (Italy), in addition to many different places within a few miles of my home. In each case, Google Maps and Google Earth could be used to record information about where I had been, to look up information about where I was going, or simply to help me understand the area I was visiting. All of these situations, and more, are documented and described within this book.

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at both amateur and professional programmers who want to make use of either Google Maps or Google Earth in their own applications. To get the best out of this book, you should have some basic programming experience and ideally be familiar with HTML and JavaScript. It would also be beneficial to have experience with scripting languages (particularly Perl) and SQL databases, such as MySQL.

Managers and other interested parties might also find sections of the book useful, because it can help them understand how the applications work and also provide background knowledge on what Google Maps and Google Earth are capable of.

How This Book Is Organized

The book is divided into four basic parts:
Part I covers the basics of the Google Maps interface, the fundamentals of the Google Maps API, and how to organize and translate existing information into a format that can successfully be used within Google Maps and Google Earth applications. The section should get you up to speed on the core techniques and abilities you need to work with the rest of the book.Part II shows you what the Google Maps system is capable of doing. In this section you’ll find information on some excellent sample applications and how to create your own Google Maps applications by extending the functionality of the core Google examples.

Part III is crammed full of examples of Google Maps applications, starting with basic markers and overlays, moving through dynamically driven examples and on to methods of highlighting key points and elements for archaeologists and Realtors. The section finishes up with an exam¬ple of a route description application. All of the examples demonstrated can be viewed online.

Part IV covers the Google Earth application. Google Earth is a standalone application, rather than a web site solution like Google Maps, and offers a completely new set of methods for describing information.

What You Need to Use This Book

For the Google Maps examples in this book, you need access to a publicly available web site where you can add and update pages, because the Google Maps API must be able to verify your pages during use. Hosting these pages on your own machine is unlikely to work. Full details of requirements, including those for accessing the Google Maps API are provided in Chapter 3.

Google Maps applications are written using JavaScript and HTML, so you should be familiar with these to be able to understand and adapt the examples. Many of the examples use a Perl script for providing data, and although these operations could also be written in PHP or Python, examples of these are not provided. Finally, some examples use a MySQL database to store information. A similar database solution, such as MySQL, Derby, PostgreSQL, or others will be required to duplicate some of the samples. All of the examples should work within the major platforms (Windows, Linux/Unix, and Mac OS X).

All of the examples in this book make use of the version 1 sequence of the Google Maps API. The API is under constant development and new versions might be released after the publica¬tion of this book that supersede the version used in the examples. The availability of the new version will not affect the operation of the examples, which are designed to work with the v1 sequence.
The Google Earth application is available for computers running Windows and Mac OS X. However, new versions and editions for existing and new platforms could be released at any time.
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