Google Map Services for your Site/Portal

[Former Member]

I love traveling. In fact if I'm not physically traveling, I'm Armchair traveling. This is probably the reason why I can ponder over an Atlas and nowadays Google Earth for maybe over an hour. Google Earth is one of the coolest inventions, and its Great. I mean, my friends and I have visited places after doing a thorough look up of the place on Google Earth. For your browser, there's Google Maps. And if you still want more, there's Google's Map API released as a Web service. Many a cool site has used it.

Its so easy to get lost in a bustling city with similar roads. Thats probably why people provide you with birds eye view maps to get a better understanding. With Google Maps you not only get that, but you get it in real life images. It would be really great if company's web sites showing their locations with addresses could also give you that snapshot of the place and its surroundings and approaching roads from above especially if you wish to go there and visit them.

I'll give you an example. Of course you would point these links at your office locations !!

You could probably start with a start page showing the locations like this:

 

When you click on any of the locations, the map is shown below with a brief description at that point.

 

The application is very simple to build. Google's API's and references are readily available. I'll post this script for you.

But first, if you intend to use this, you have to sign up for a Google Map API Key from here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/. You can then use the key in the application below.

Troy | Stonehenge | Great Wall of China | Sphinx

Now this application is a simple HTML with JavaScript. You could use it in a Portal Application Project. Create a JSP as a stand alone resource, place the code there and proceed to make an iView out of the resultant PAR file.

Typically a corporate portal might have its office locations listed on a page where you could create this scenario. Its also ideal for an external facing anonymous based portal. Thats a more common scenario.