Jonathan Snook is a freelance web developer living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. His very popular blog cover topics such as CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Open Source, etc. He is also a web columnist for Digital Web Magazine, and has co-authored The Art and Science of CSS and Pro DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs and Libraries. Jonathan was nice enough to give me some of his time to answer questions about JavaScript and libraries.
Hasin Hayder is a web developer, author, PHP Certified Engineer and open source enthusiast from Bangladesh. He has authored WordPress Complete and Smarty PHP Template Programming. He works at a personalized startpage company called PageFlakes as a development engineer. Hasin was nice enough to give me some of his time to answer some questions concerning accessibility in Ajax, WordPress, open source and important web skills.
Since the emergence of Google Maps giving us the ability to put an interactive map on your own web page(s), there are now four separate APIs to choose from: Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth Bing Maps, and MapQuest. These APIs are similar, so once you understand one; it is just a matter of learning the differences of the others.
It’s pretty interesting noticing the visual and functional differences as you go back and forth looking at each one. Personally, I favor Google Maps because of its smooth interface, clean look, and easy to understand documentation, but Yahoo! Maps is a close second.
Yahoo! Maps also provides a Flash API version (see below) that can use either JavaScript or Flash ActionScript code.
Virtual Earth reminds me of the interfaces Microsoft has for many of its development products (which can be good or bad), but provides the most intriguing visual experience with its aerial and bird’s eye views. MapQuest is the new kid on the block and has the least visually entertaining experience, but incorporates its biggest strength with driving directions so it has some potential.
All of the APIs are built upon the theory of geocoding, but offer different implementations for allowing you to retrieve latitude/longitude points either within the JavaScript API or using external REST calls. For the later, you will need to incorporate some server-side scripting (PHP, ASP, etc) to retrieve the information you want. If you do not want to be bothered with that, but need specific points (latitude/longitude) for an address(s) you can use websites such as http://geocoder.us/ or you can use my simple geocoding example.
There actually is another mapping API called Map TP, but requires that the browser have the Java Runtime installed.
