Two years back I had to write a new mapping implementation for my former employer, who wanted to move away from MapQuest. We chose Google Maps, for a number of reasons. I wrote the implementation using Scott Mebberson's implementation, the Google Maps Tag. I was quick and easy, and ultimately we had to ditch it at the last minute. Why? Google's licensing at the time was too restrictive for our use case. Running almost 2,000 sites of of one codebase, we would have had to get a separate license key for each site, or get an enterprise license through Google. We were going down that path originally, but the cost at the time was almost $40k, and required some work on their part that they couldn't make our deadline (during the holidays), so when the autorenewal kicked in on (cheaper) MapQuest we just rolled with it.

Last month my former employer once again wanted to get rid of MapQuest. First we looked at our implementation, realizing that the same hurdles were in place. Next we looked at ColdFusion 9's new cfmap tags. That implementation works the same way, requiring the API key per domain. Luckily, I remembered seeing a tweet from someone about changes to Google's Maps API. A change that wouldn't require an API key anymore. So, I went to check it out.

The latest version of the Google Maps Javascript API is very nice, and has one very significant change.

The JavaScript Maps API V3 is a free service, available for any web site that is free to consumers.

This was perfect, as all of our sites were free to consumers. The first thing I did was try to make some adjustments to my initial implementation from Scott's tags. This didn't work, as there were some major differences in Google's new implementation. I ended up rewriting the entire implementation to work with the new API, creating my own custom tag. In forking Scott's code, I had to keep the license the same, which allows me to put it back out to the community at large (and with the approval of my old boss).

CFGMap is now available on RIAForge for download. My simple example source code is included with the download, and all code is heavily documented. My example uses JQuery for the basic DOM manipulation involved, but JQuery is not required to use the tag itself. You'll want to pay special attention to the testmap.js file, which shows how you can access your map object to plot directions and stuff. The tag puts a map on the page, and plots the points you've fed to it. It will even trigger a callback method, that you define, for passing lat/lng info that's been goelocated back to your database, reducing the geolocation hits on subsequent map visits.

It's only the first go-around with the updated library, and I'm sure that changes will need to be made at some point. I welcome any and all feedback, questions, and suggestions.

This entry was posted on January 18, 2011 at 7:40 PM and has received 2453 views. There are currently 15 comments. Print this entry.