The "new" Google Maps and its relationship with API V3

[Nianwei Liu]

This would be a "discussion" not a "question" that's why I posted here.

So the "new" maps.google.com is out for a while, from the surface, it no longer uses pre-rendered tiles and everything are drawn on the client as graphics using the vector data streamed from server, could be WebGL and/or other graphics API. Although it probably won't be widely adopted until most users getting a more powerful machine to handle the demand, it seems this is where Google is heading. After all it opens a lot of opportunities to get on same page with the mobile experience on Android and iOS.

That's lead to the question of what the JS API v3 is going to do, and in turn how 3rd party developers will be impacted. Will there be a dramatic V4 coming out that is non-backward compatible like V3 to V2, or those will be somehow eased into V3? For end users, when they see a website built with Google API, they probably expect similar behavior to maps.google.com. V3 has been adding features in the last couple of years to mimic maps.google.com, which has been evolving based on V2 code base until the recent release of the "new" Google map. However, this round of change seems to quite significant.

Thoughts?

[Barry Hunter]

So the "new" maps.google.com is out for a while, from the surface, it no longer uses pre-rendered tiles and everything are drawn on the client as graphics using the vector data streamed from server, could be WebGL and/or other graphics API.

Yes, its WebGL, but with a fallback to Canvas, when WebGL isnt available

Look at the URLs of the 'switch' links on this page... 

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3031966?hl=en

 

That's lead to the question of what the JS API v3 is going to do, and in turn how 3rd party developers will be impacted. Will there be a dramatic V4 coming out that is non-backward compatible like V3 to V2, or those will be somehow eased into V3?

I would expect it will bump to v4 as its a significant change 'internally'. 

But for most part the API interface itself should be backwards compartible with v3. Dont think the API itself would have to change all that much. v3 was incompatible with v2 mainly to introduce all the MVC goodness, not that the actual "mapping" stuff. 

Things like the default controls visible would probably change, but the actual controls would be toggleable via pretty much the same API as can control controls now. 

Possibly the Styling API would change, but in theory the same exposed API could be used to style vector maps just as it styles raster tiles. 

I would imagine they would still expose a raster 'MapType' as many developers already have image based layers want to maintain, these could be layered over the vector map layers too. 

But this is speculative :)