Google have yet again pulled an amazing piece of work out of their magical hat. Google Maps is the latest project to enter their ‘beta’ program. It manages to dynamically resize your window, scroll with the mouse in real time, zoom in almost real time, search for businesses in the current map area and can be controlled via keyboard shortcuts! Its only the US at the moment but knowing google it won’t stay that way for long. They also manage to cram in route-finding, that will show you the route and give you a list of directions.
Like Google Suggest they do lots of requests in the background to maintain the ‘current page’ for the user. This time its not all with that new fangled XMLHTTP object, they request content in a hidden iframe and then switch it about. Even cooler though is the fact that they actually get back XML data and use a javascript XML object to do the transformation into something readable. It looks like the map segements are all pre-rendered aswell, they seem to want to keep the processing as much client side as possible. Which is extremely sensible for google as I’m sure they have a lot of computing power, but not unlimited.
More reading:
http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/09.html
http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html