Book Image

Google Maps JavaScript API Cookbook

Book Image

Google Maps JavaScript API Cookbook

Overview of this book

Day by day, the use of location data is becoming more and more popular, and Google is one of the main game changers in this area. The Google Maps JavaScript API is one of the most functional and robust mapping APIs used among Geo developers. With Google Maps, you can build location-based apps, maps for mobile apps, visualize geospatial data, and customize your own maps.Google Maps JavaScript API Cookbook is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear, step-by-step recipes that will help you to unleash the capabilities of the Google Maps JavaScript API in conjunction with open source or commercial GIS servers and services through a number of practical examples of real world scenarios. This book begins by covering the essentials of including simple maps for Web and mobile, adding vector and raster layers, styling your own base maps, creating your own controls and responding to events, and including your own events.You will learn how to integrate open source or commercial GIS servers and services including ArcGIS Server, GeoServer, CartoDB, Fusion Tables, and Google Maps Engine with the Google Maps JavaScript API. You will also extend the Google Maps JavaScript API to push its capabilities to the limit with additional libraries and services including geometry, AdSense, geocoding, directions, and StreetView.This book covers everything you need to know about creating a web map or GIS applications using the Google Maps JavaScript API on multiple platforms.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Google Maps JavaScript API Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Adding tile overlays to maps


Google Maps has a selection of base maps as street maps and satellite imagery, which we discussed in the previous chapter; we will now discuss how additional base maps can be introduced to the Google Maps interface.

We can also use tiled map services as overlays to the base maps. By overlay, you can think of a separate sheet of map tiles put over the base maps. You can observe the details of the overlaid layer together with the base map. Examples of overlay layers might be of the boundaries of areas of interest, special POIs that are not found in the Google Maps' base maps, statistical results to be presented with aerial or point styling, and so on.

The tile map services that are used as base maps can technically be used as overlays in the Google Maps JavaScript API. However, using these tile map services (such as OpenStreetMaps) as overlays results in blocking the original base maps of Google Maps, as there would be no blank space in the map of overlaid tile map...