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

Searching for and showing nearby places


Google Maps is not only about beautiful base maps with an immense cartographic quality or regularly updated satellite images. In your daily life, not as a programmer but as an ordinary user of Google Maps, you will have no doubt used Google Maps to search for places; be it The Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York, or a commonplace farmacia in Rome.

This information is in Google Maps, but how can you reach and serve this information through the Google Maps JavaScript API?

The places library is there exactly for this purpose, and it enables you to look for places by using certain search parameters.

You can perform nearby searches where place results would be near the location that you have provided, most commonly, the user's location. You can search within a radius, or you can just specify a search string. You can even request for additional details, such as related photos, review ratings, phone numbers, and opening hours for particular places.

This recipe...