Do You Recommend Google Maps API or Microsoft Live Maps? 252
KSobby writes "The organization that I work for is going to be redoing our website in .Net/AJAX. On the site, our members will have profile pages listing where their organizations are located (our members are scattered throughout the world) as well as other pertinent information for the general public. It is a non-profit organization, so funds are tight. My question to you: If we include maps, which API do we go with: Google or Microsoft? We're in a Microsoft environment (we're non-profit and Microsoft basically gives us everything for free) but the ubiquity of Google may be enough to sway us. Has anyone used either extensively? Used them in conjunction with .Net?"
Microsoft API experience (Score:3, Informative)
About to make the switch (Score:3, Informative)
Go with Microsoft, get MapCruncher (Score:5, Informative)
MapCruncher rocks!
Checkout refin.com's comparison (Score:5, Informative)
How about this then? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:OpenStreetMap? (Score:4, Informative)
I'll say. The entire city of Philadelphia is missing, and it's not exactly a small city. In fact, looking at the eastern US, it's pretty much useless at this point. Alas.
OpenLayers.org API ! (Score:5, Informative)
Do both. Seriously. (Score:5, Informative)
Do both. Seriously.
One of the oldest rules a downstream manufacturer (that's you) should follow is "avoid supplier lock-in". If you code with only one of these software titans in mind, you're subject to their terms. If you code for both, you can tell one vendor to zark off and/or play one rep against the other at pricing/ad-rev negotiation time.
Oh wait - you're a small non-profit with free Microsoft software? In that case there's no reason not to go with Microsoft. Development in 100% Microsoft tools is better than anything Google has...
Google maps == Google earth (Score:4, Informative)
So you can easily do pretty-ultra-eyecandy that also works well when viewed just through the web.
Google Maps...but. (Score:3, Informative)
But I would look around for an asp.net control that wraps the api. There was one on the code project that doesn't work anymore.
Microsoft Live Maps might have a wrapped api for you that could reduce the development time.
OpenStreetMap uses OpenLayers.org (Score:3, Informative)
Data (Score:4, Informative)
For example [live.com], when I-74 was built, McKinney Road was re-routed to Hwy 601. The map has the correct positioning for I-74, but it still shows the old path of McKinney Road, even though the new path is visible in the image.
On the other hand [google.com], Google shows the roads correctly, but you can't zoom in the imagery nearly as close.
So its a matter of priorities. Do you want accurate or pretty?
Re:Google Maps (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft. It took me 4 hours to port our software to Vista, and that mostly had to do with a (nonMS) driver and a (MS) dll issue. The trick to MS backwards compatibility is to not use the undocumented shit. SimCity broke when they went to 95 (they actually installed a patch in the OS for it for compatibility reasons), because of undocumented "features". Case in point, the permissions that they set up in XP were ignored by most developers because everyone ran in Admin mode. Then, they get to Vista, and "Accept or Deny" became famous overnight. Our installer, and our software, followed the annoying rules in XP on the offchance that someone was running as a regular user. Hence, when we ported over to Vista, the only time users had to verify the softwares intention was when installing the first time/patches. And that's a good time to pop that box up.
Actually niether (Score:4, Informative)
I set up a website for a brick-and-mortar store about seven months ago on my Mac. I then went to Google's maps and provided a link for directions. Then Google quit working with Safari browsers. Now, I know Apple's browser has its problems and has so many that many Mac users are not using the Apple-supplied beta browser because of problems with their release version but I cannot afford for anyone to not be able to load a map due to a problem with someone's map API. So I switched the website to use Mapquest. [mapquest.com]
Yes, I know that Mapquest is a slag-heap of a company since AO-Hell purchased it. I also know they're not innovating, they're just resting on their laurels and being used to provide AO-Hell with cash. But it works with all browsers I tested on Windows and Macintosh platforms, including some pretty obscure ones like iCab and Netscape's Navigator 2.0. Unless of until I get absolute assurances from Google that they'll never roll out new code again unless they test it first, I'm not using Google Maps for anything.
Haven't tried Microsoft's. Probably won't either as they won't work well with Macs or Linux or Unix and I cannot afford to disenfranchise anyone.
I'll recomment google maps (Score:2, Informative)
Also, if you need to do anything more advanced, you can use your own map tiles, and they provide nice methods for doing lat/lon -> pixel conversions if you need to render and cache some data that will overlay on the map. This is relatively new for GMaps, and I'm not sure if Microsoft's service offers this or not..
Who will be using what you develop? (Score:3, Informative)
Google endeavors to support a much broader range of browsers than any of the Microsoft websites support. Give the users of what you are developing a choice, don't force them to use Microsoft's IE in order to take advantage of the functionality of your website.
Re:I would like to counter-offer (Score:2, Informative)
Not everyone or everything should run linux. And I've been using linux since 1.3, and have no windows boxes in my house (other than in VMs)
Redfin dev blog (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Compatibility (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In my experience (Score:3, Informative)
For Google Maps, I've found a simple wrapper class that cuts down immensely on the code,
and similar projects are bound to exist for
maps work in pretty much any browser.
Re:Certainly Microsoft (Score:2, Informative)
Documentation was key for me (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I wrote a local API for it in the language I'm working in, Water [waterlanguage.org], and let Water deal with all the Google stuff for me. By mixing Water's AJAX features with Google's map API, I was able to create a fully AJAX enabled map API which notifies the server about every user action on the map, including clicking, dragging, etc, and deals with user initiated actions in an object oriented manner (for example, if a user clicks on a pin point on the map in the browser, it fires an event in the corresponding place object in the server). I also created an interface to KML, the language which was used by Google Earth and which is sometimes used by google maps now. KML is also well documented. I linked that into our place objects as well, so you can easily get a google map or some kml for any place object. KML is also useful because some other commercial mapping products are now starting to use KML as well.
I certainly wouldn't have been able to do all this without excellent documentation and a rich API from Google. Thanks to them providing both, the implementation went quickly and easily, and now Water has a fabulous map API thanks to Google making it all easy. And yes, I do have a clue what some of the alternatives are: prior to doing the implementation with Google Maps, I did another implementation using government services. (Actually, both are just subclasses of our abstract cartographer class, so it's a very direct comparison.) Google offered a much richer and easier API.
I did look at some other online mapping services, and if they offered an API, I found them to be more limited.
I can't comment on the Microsoft API or documentation, I haven't tried them.
Re:Google will spy on your members (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the link that says "Privacy Policy" at the bottom of the Google Maps API page [google.com] which links to, maybe, the google privacy policy [google.com] doesn't actually exist?
Dang. My mind is more powerful than I thought!
(for reference, the MS Maps privacy policy is here [microsoft.com]).
Want to know where Google gets their mapping tech? (Score:2, Informative)
They also host services, just like Google does, that you can connect to via their API's. Those API's are made to be OpenLS compliant, AJAX friendly, and other good things.
Disclaimer: I haven't written any code to work with their stuff, I haven't been with the company since 2003, I don't know how good or bad it this part of their business is. If anyone wants to take a look at tell me I'm all ears (sounds like the tech guys on here are a lot better at tech than I am).
Anyway, my only point is that there is a food-chain in the mapping space and nothing says that you will get the best value or service from either Microsoft OR Google, despite how popular their offerings might be. There are lots of other players in the chain that might be able to do more for you than the guys with the popular UI's at the top of the chain.
Re:OpenStreetMap uses OpenLayers.org (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Compatibility (Score:3, Informative)
Open in what sense? Source code? No - neither.
Platform agnostic? Google
Re:I let google answer (Score:3, Informative)
Hrmm.. not for me. Check out screenshot [lfi.net]