Add Driving Directions and Traffic to your Google Maps Mashup!

Last week during the 2007 Google Developer Day the Google Maps API Team reviewed and introduced a number of significant new enhancements for the Google Maps API. This will help those of you creating Google Maps mashups to improve your mashups with support for things like driving directions and live traffic overlays.

Driving Directions - No more linking off to Google Maps for driving directions on your mashup. The Google Maps API now supports driving directions so you can include this great Google Maps feature right in your mashup or tool! Google's Yatin Chawathe explains it best in this Google Maps API Blog post: "..The simplest way to add driving directions to your page is to create a map, create a DIV for the directions panel, attach both of them to the new GDirections object, and fire off a query to it!" This blog post will give you the steps and sample code to get this going, and there is also a new section to the Google Maps API Documentation that will help you as well.

Live Traffic Conditions Overlay - Want to show present traffic conditions on your Google Maps mashup? Import the same traffic monitoring available on Google Maps for several US cities into your Google Maps API site by following the steps laid out in the new Traffic section of the Google Maps API Docs.

Also new and updated in the Google Maps API:

Create image overlays with GGroundOverlay & GGeoXML (Documentation here..)
Usage of the Marker Manager
Google Maps API geocoder updated
Syndicate your Google Maps mashup with a "Google Mapplet"

YouTube video of "Google Maps API New Features":

Here is the presentation that Doug used during this talk. It should help you out with sample code that puts all these new features to use in your Google Maps API site..

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Technorati Tags: GDD07, Google Maps Mashups