Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax From Novice to Professional by Michael Purvis ebook

Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax From Novice to Professional by Michael PurvisISBN-13 : 9781590597071ISBN-10 : 1590597079In the Beginning. . .In the history of the Internet, 2005?2006 will be remembered as the year when online mappingfinally came of age. Prior to 2005, MapQuest and other mapping services allowed you to lookup directions, search for locations, and map businesses, but these searches were limited, usuallyto 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 quietlyreleased the beta of Google Maps to its Labs incubator (http://labs.google.com) and letword-of-mouth marketing promote the new service.By all accounts, Google Maps was an instant hit. It was the first free mapping service toprovide satellite map views of any location on the earth, allowing anyone to look for familiarplaces. This started the ?I can see my house from here? trend, and set the blogosphere abuzzwith 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 itscode was something that quickly set it apart from the rest. Although unannounced and possiblyunplanned, they provided the means to manipulate the code of Google Maps to plotyour own locations. Moreover, you could combine this base mapping technology with anexternal data source to instantly map many location-based points of information. And all ofthis could be done on privately owned domains, seemingly independent of Google itself.At first, mapping ?hackers? unlocked this functionality, just as video gamers hack intogames by entering simple cheat codes. They created their own mapping services using GoogleMaps and other sources. One of the first these was Housingmaps.com, which combined thecraigslist.org housing listings with a searchable Google Maps interface. Next came AdrianHolovaty?s chicagocrime.org, which offered a compelling way to view crime data logged by theChicago 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 MapsAPI, which is the foundation for this book. By releasing this API, Google allowed programmersthe opportunity to build an endless array of applications on top of Google Maps. Hundreds ofAPI keys were registered immediately after the announcement, and many sites integratingGoogle Maps appeared within days. The map mashup was born.