We've just rolled out an exciting new addition to the Google Code Knowledge Base: Articles & Tutorials. Here's a summary of 3 Maps-related articles. Give these articles a read, and learn something new this weekend!
Creating a Simple Digitizer Using the Google Maps API
Have you seen Google's "My Maps" feature, which has the fun feature of letting you click to create lines and shapes? You may be surprised to find out how easy it is to create a similar tool using the Google Maps API. This article describes how to build a simple digitizer that allows users to point and click, or "draw", around a particular region and store the geographical coordinates in KML.
Using PHP/MySQL with Google Maps
Are you a developer accustomed to developing mySQL-driven websites with PHP? Do you want to learn how to use Google Maps with your database using "AJAX" techniques? This article goes through the steps of creating a mySQL table, populating the table with data, using PHP to generate XML from that mySQL table, and finally, writing the HTML/Javascript webpage to dynamically load in the PHP-generated XML and display a map with multiple markers and custom icons. After going through this tutorial, you should be ready to extend what you've learned to your own databases.
Adding Metadata to Your KML Files
Update: This article was removed as Metadata was deprecated in KML 2.2.Read our Developer Guide for information about using ExtendedData.
Keyhole Markup Language, or KML, is a simple but powerful file format for displaying geographic data in an earth browser, such as Google Earth or Google Maps. Increasingly, people are starting to use it in their own applications to represent geographic data. Exchanging data between applications, however, can sometimes be a challenge. This article describes how with KML 2.1 the new element <Metadata> allows you to include structured data in your KML
