Arno Manders

A week ago I went to the supermarket and I noticed an odd car like below

google street car

It is driving around to make 360 degrees photos of the streets for the street view function in google maps. This function is available in most parts of USA but here in europa there is less coverage.

The car was driving here:

Grotere kaart weergeven

To bad that they are bluring my face. I hope that they put it online in the very near future

After the Flash Google maps API release I spend some time to see what is possible. I started with the documentation from Google. In there documentation they are using the latitude and longitude coordinates to set the center of your map. This is not really a human readable way to do it and personally I never used the latitude and longitude coordinates to find a city or street in Google Maps. That is why I started searching for a way to center the map with an address.

I build a small application with source-code available in Flex that is using this technique. In the left upper corner you can search your own address. I use ClientGeocoder to search for the address but the problem i’m running in to is that you can’t run it local because he returns this error.

Warning: Domain maps.googleapis.com does not explicitly specify a
meta-policy, but Content-Type of policy file
http://maps.googleapis.com/mapsapi/crossdomain.xml is
'text/x-cross-domain-policy'.  Applying meta-policy 'by-content-type'.

You can’t use ClientGeocoder crossdomain. You should call it from a domain that has a registered Google Maps API key in my case “http://blog.arnomanders.nl”.

Introduction
Last week A month ago Gerard Lolkema had a lot of trouble getting Google Maps working in Ruby on rails so he asked me for help.

Gerard Lolkema already found a tutorial to do this. The tutorial: Rails, Geocoding, and Google Maps from Andre on Tech. This tutorial provides you of a lot of code that is direct usable but because we make a dutch website we need to display addresses from The Netherlands. This functionality is not in the code (and probably not in the plugin) of Andre on Tech. He is using a web service from an other website to get the longitude and latitude from an address, but the problem is that it is only possible to send US addresses. To find that problem took us half a day.

Finally we found an alternative to put Google Maps in our website. And this is how we did it.

Put Google Maps in your webpage
First you need a Google Maps API Key

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