Introduction

Location is becoming a very popular topic day by day, and Google is one of the main game changers in this area. Most websites have a contact page with Google Maps showing the location of the business. This is the simplest usage of the Google Maps JavaScript API. There are also other advanced usages of it to show different information on maps. This whole book contains multiple usage recipes on the Google Maps JavaScript API, from beginner to advanced topics. There are different parts that make up the Google Maps JavaScript API such as the raster/vector layers, controls, events, and services, which are all covered in the following chapters.

There are both open source and commercial alternatives to the Google Maps JavaScript API, such as OpenLayers, Leaflet, Bing Maps, MapQuest, and Here Maps (formerly, Nokia Maps), but the Google Maps JavaScript API has great support in base maps, satellite images, and the API itself. For example, the API can be used to show only one location or all the data of a government agency on a map.

The Google Maps JavaScript API is not a free tool to show maps, but its free usage limit is enough for most developers. There is a limit of 25,000 map loads per day per site, which is counted when a map is initialized on a web page.