Google Maps Sandbox

I have been a Google Maps enthusiast for some time and of late have been venting some of that enthusiasm in the google-maps tag on Stack Overflow. Despite having answered a bucket load of questions and done quite a bit of development with the Google Maps API, I sometimes encounter a question whose solution requires some empirical testing.

To facilitate these tests I set up a sandbox page on my site to host my cobbled together examples. The process has been quite rewarding and I have found myself delving into areas of the API which I would have ignored for my own projects. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Draw a square at an arbitrary point - This mostly involved taking someone else's awesome server side code, to determine a location an arbitrary distance/direction from a known point, and porting it to Javascript. Although I didn't get any questioner love on this one, the solution was still quite satisfying.
• Directions - Before this question I hadn't had a chance to play with the GDirections functionality in the API. This simple example just grabs the route between two points. The corresponding questioner was having some trouble getting this to work and it turned out the problem was unrelated.
• Travel time data - You can use the GDirections object without providing a map and directions div and just get the data back as a JSON response. In this demo I grabbed the driving time for the directions calculated between two points.
• Overlays - Had a lot of fun answering this question with a simple demo for using GTileLayerOverlay. The ability to leverage to the Google Maps API with your own tilesets is very powerful.
• Open street map tiles in Google maps - I implemented this demo for a question I didn't actually answer myself. I was browsing questions and found one that described how you can use the Google Maps API with an entirely separate map tile set, in this case from OpenStreetMap.org. This seemed like such a cool concept, I had to try it out.

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