Google Maps and Google Earth (being two different things, see footnote) both have changed the way we will look at online mapping forever. (I’ll limit my focus to Google Maps but most of my comments apply equally well to Earth).

All of my clients have made it clear that they want their map enabled web pages to be able to do what Google Maps does; and this should come as no surprise. The folks at Google don’t know what their doing; and this is a good thing. They think like most people; not like GIS people and their products reflect this naïve success and giving people what they want. I’m using the terms “dkwtd” and “naïve” on purpose; not to denigrate what Google has accomplished but to point out that they’ve approached the problem from the popular consumer’s point of view.

What is great about Google is not the content or data model but the web interface. Google has been one of the leaders in delivering what is euphemistically called Web 2 – a family of web interfaces that behave more like desk top products. The challenges of providing a quality user interface over the web is significant but there have been some great break-throughs in the last year. The one most often mentioned is something called AJAX (short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but you may immediately forget this).

AJAX provides a set of protocols that allow a constant chatter between the client web browser and the server. If the user leaves a mouse sitting over a location for more than 3 seconds, AJAX could communicate with the server and open a pop-up telling the user some details about the location. It can notify the server to prepare look-ahead map requests so that the user can pan and zoom about and find the data already prepared. (AJAX is nothing new really, what is new is the sense of a standardized protocol and emerging products). There are pros and cons to AJAX and a lot of heated discussion within the Java web developer community; but there is little doubt that it represents a radical shift in web technology.

What I fear from AJAX is what I’ve always been concerned about with web applications; I see too many sites that look great but they give the seasoned professional "systems" developer enough cardiac shocks to lay him out cold. This is a hackers paradigm -- hackers are folks who just "make it work"; they scrap web pages, borrow from here and beg from there and "mash" a cool solution together before they move on to the next cool idea. Hackers are the bleeding edge of the development community; they don’t worry about reusable code, designed systems, rational architectures, or any of the painfully learned lessons that "systems" developers have learned over the last fifty years. Google Maps is for people who want to write a cool web PAGE not complex reliable SYSTEMS. In fact Google goes to great pains to emphasize that this is just about Fun; no money, no licenses, no commitments -- just cool web pages. I hate to be a boring old codger but half a dozen young geniuses at Google and a thousand Hackers do not a reliable system create.

That off my chest, let there be no doubt; if the folks at Oracle, ESRI, Intergraph, MapInfo, Autodesk, et al don’t offer equivalent functionality (read cool interfaces) in very short order, they’re out of the web business. Google has set a new standard, this is Windows versus DOS time again; yet another disruptive technology.

The good news is that most of the above mentioned companies are already showing signs of catching up. My own current focus (Oracle Spatial) already has a MapViewer EA11 out that begins to leverage some of the power of AJAX. And Oracle’s Java development teams are major leaders in the integration of AJAX with JavaServer Faces (JSF is yet another important component of Web 2). You can google AJAX and any of the above company names to see what your favorite vendor is doing in this area.

Google Maps is just the beginning of a new wave of web application tools that will change what we think the web is all about. Google has introduced us to new asynchronous web interfaces but this technology is not unique to Google and others will deliver to fall by the wayside.

P.S. I find that some people confuse Google Maps and Google Earth. They share a lot in common but are quite different products.

Earth is a downloaded desktop tool that reads data from the web. It comes in a “free”, Plus ($20), Pro ($400), and an Enterprise version at varying costs. You can also buy server additions to run your own dedicated version of Earth ($have a salesman contact me). The free version runs on Windows and the Mac (beta) but the commercial versions are currently only available for Windows. See http://earth.google.com/products.html for more details.

Maps is a pure web tool that more closely corresponds to MapQuest and MapPoint type products. The Google Maps API allows developers to integrate Google Maps into their own web pages and data sources. See http://maps.google.com/apis/ for more information or read “Google Maps Hacks: Tips & Tools for Geographic Searching and Remixing” by Gibson & Erle (O’Reilly).