Google Maps JavaScript API

Google Maps is a web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360 degrees panoramic views of streets , real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle and air, or public transportation.

The Maps JavaScript API lets you customize maps with your own content and imagery for display on web pages and mobile devices. The Maps JavaScript API features four basic map types (roadmap, satellite, hybrid, and terrain) which you can modify using layers and styles, controls and events, and various services and libraries.

The Maps JavaScript API team regularly updates the API with new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. You can indicate which version of the API to load within your application by specifying it in the v parameter of the Maps JavaScript API bootstrap request.

Basic Map Types
There are four types of maps available within the Maps JavaScript API. In addition to the familiar "painted" road map tiles, the Maps JavaScript API also supports other maps types.

The following map types are available in the Maps JavaScript API:
- roadmap displays the default road map view. This is the default map type.
- satellite displays Google Earth satellite images.
- hybrid displays a mixture of normal and satellite views.
- terrain displays a physical map based on terrain information.


You modify the map type in use by the Map by setting its mapTypeId property, either within the constructor via setting its Map options object, or by calling the map's setMapTypeId() method. The mapTypeID property defaults to roadmap. Some Tools can download the small tiles and save them to your hard disk, including the normal maps, satellite maps, hybrid maps and terrain maps. Google Maps Downloader is an application that will help us to download all the images that we want, by simple inputting the exact coordinates of the location.

The Maps JavaScript API supports special 45 degrees imagery for certain locations. This high-resolution imagery provides perspective views towards each of the cardinal direction (North, South, East, West). These images are available at higher zoom levels for supported map types.

Custom Map Types
The Maps JavaScript API supports the display and management of custom map types, allowing you to implement your own map imagery or tile overlays. Several possible map type implementations exist within the Maps JavaScript API. Standard tile sets consisting of images which collectively constitute full cartographic maps. These tile sets are also known as base map types.

Image tile overlays which display on top of existing base map types. Generally, these map types are used to augment an existing map type to display additional information and are often constrained to specific locations and/or zoom levels.

Non-image map types, which allow you to manipulate the display of map information at its most fundamental level. Each of these options relies on creating a class that implements the MapType interface. Additionally, the ImageMapType class provides some built-in behavior to simplify the creation of imagery map types.