Million Pieces

Today I was going to the Google Maps API documentation and after using it for a while, my eye was caught by this:

It’s maybe a bit difficult to read from the above image, but it says:

The Google Maps API is now integrated with the Google AJAX API loader…

I couldn’t remember seeing this before, so besides clicking on the link, I googled “Google AJAX API loader”. I found out it’s a very new way of using multiple Google javascript APIs on the same page.

The main purpose for the loader is to unify namespaces across the different APIs on one page and to have only one script tag instead of separate script tags for each of the APIs you wanna use on your page.
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To Gadget developers that is. A few days ago Google announced Google Gadget Ventures, a pilot project for funding third-party Gadget developers.

The Official Google Blog says Google wants to help developers who want to spend more time developing Gadgets and:

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love—building great Gadgets.

It’s very nice of Google to think about us pour developers, but I don’t think this is the main reason.

Google knows how important the developer community is. Without developers who want to create Gadgets, iGoogle won’t be very popular and people will go to Yahoo, Netvibes or one of the other personalized pages services. I even think there are more Netvibes modules at the moment than there are Google Gadgets. So it’s a very smart move to start awarding developers.

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This morning there’s some great news about the Google Maps API:

The Google Maps API Team is excited to announce our new open source project, the GMaps Utility Library. This project will be hosted on code.google.com and will let the Google engineers for the Maps API work hand-in-hand with the many great developers in the Maps API community. Together, we can extend the core Maps API and ensure that every developer need is met.

There are a few reasons why I think this is great news:

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Through this article at the geonames blog I found the ‘API Feature Requests’ page.

This page lists feature requests for the Google Maps API. If you like a feature and it’s already listed, you can write your name next to it to. If it’s not listed you can append it to the list.

There are a few very interesting feature requests.

‘Compatibility with other map APIs’. This is the feature request the article at the Geonames weblog talks about. Indeed it would be very nice if there’s a common API which is shared between all the Map vendors. There can be different reasons why you want to switch between different maps, eg the license changes, the area your application is about is covered better in a different map, etc. One problem I can think of with this approach is the that the feature set is not the same for every Map. So this common API can only cover the basics, but maybe that’s enough?

If you want a common API right away you have to take a look at projects like myMap, or Mapstraction. These projects are adding an extra layer on top of the major Map APIs from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. You could also use the Open Layers API which also supports the APIs of these vendors.

Another nice feature request is ‘Ability to restrict geocoder to a particular region, country’. If this would be possible and your application is about a specific region you even could create an auto completion search on addresses.

If you’re using the Google Maps API a lot, take a look at the list and add your name or feature request to it.