Beginning Google Maps Applications

Rails 2 changed the way to_json works on ActiveRecord objects. Prior to Rails 2, to_json returned a hash of hashes — the first level hash had the key ‘attributes’, which in turn had another hash with your field name/values.
With Rails 2, calling to_json on an AR object just gives you a hash of field name/values. […]

In the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of people complaining about the lack of asinh() on the Windows version of PHP. We use the asinh() function extensively in Chapter 7 for the custom tile overlays. Admittedly, we didn’t test any of the code against windows versions of PHP (we’re LAMP folks), so until […]

DragZoom (previously called GZoom) is my drag-to-zoom custom Google Map control I open-sourced last year. I’m happy to say the code has been incorporated into Google’s own GMaps Utility Library. Thanks to Pamela Fox from Google for doing a lot of work to bring it in. You can now source DragZoom directly off of Google’s […]

Back in January, I demonstrated how to extend GMarker for text-based labels. In the interests of keeping things simple, I ignored any event handling, and just covered the nuts and bolts of how to make a wrapper class in JavaScript, and how to add the basic functionality we wanted.
Well, we had a number of requests […]

The Ruby on Rails code is ready to downloaded. Here’s how to get it up and running in your environment:

Download the zip file, gmaps_rails_code.zip
Create your own empty Rails application (rails your_app_name)
Unzip gmaps_rails_code.zip in the root of your newly created application. When you unzip the file, you will see it contains five root directories: app, db, […]