Question

Do you suggest Mapstraction (library) as a layer to access Google maps?

Is it an actively maintained project? Do I stand to again/ lose anything by using this library apart from the primary reason that its provider independent?

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Solution

Have used this for a pretty major product, easy to use and extend. Well recommended so that mapping product can be swapped out in the future if needs be.

Cheers,

Rob

OTHER TIPS

After reading this post I researched the same question and I think a little clarification might be in order.

OpenLayers has a larger user base than Mapstraction but still smaller than GoogleMaps(GM had over 1000 posts in the last two weeks, OpenLayers developer forum had 169 posts in october, mapstraction had 33. Its not a totally fair comparison because the questions on OpenLayers and Mapstraction seem to be a bit more sophisticated developer types and have less spam. I think both open layers and mapstraction support the use of google maps within google's the TOS by wrapping the full google maps js api.

One advantage of Mapstraction over OpenLayers is that more direct access to googles api while open layers supports fewer ports of the google api but supports them more pretty consistently across the maps it supports. This list serve question covers it pretty well http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@openlayers.org/msg02039.html

We have been considering a move from GoogleMaps to mapstraction and here are a few thoughts on my experience getting started with the Mapstraction api wrapper.

On their home page they link to a complicated buggy demo that doesn't cover the current version of google maps. If you dig around git hub there is a api v3 demo here https://github.com/mapstraction/mxn/blob/master/examples/googlev3.html

The code base on github seems well writtern but their documentation is shakey.. in fact when you search for "mapstraction" on google the API Doc site link points to obsolete docs that don't cover v3 either. If you download the git hub source there are autogenerated docs that do cover v3 but no nice simple getting started example. Their mailing list is difficult to search but I didn't see any examples on their either. It also appears that while they abandoned code.google.com for the main source trunk they still rely on it in all the examples to host the js files and inject dependency using the .js(apitype) setup. like this http://mapstraction.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/source/mxn.js?(openlayers) I ran into some chatter on the list serv that suggested the google js file often excluded necessary patches in the code base. I haven't found a nice getting started doc, or email that explains their preferred scheme for linking code or injecting api dependency.

All these are small issues and they appear to have a good core team. So, if you need to support google specific maps functions they seem like a good way to go.

For reference here are their simpler examples https://github.com/mapstraction/mxn/tree/master/examples/

you might also look at http://openlayers.org/

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