Google Maps and jQuery – calculating distance between two points
It has been a long time since I wrote my last example, but I've been really busy. Lately I got a request to write an example about calculating the distance between two points using KML file. What I will show you in this example is how to provide an user two drop down fields, which will be build according to provided KML file. Choosing each field will show a marker on the map. Changing the drop down field will cause removal of an according marker and placement of it in a new location. Also the markers will have two different colors, so an user can differentiate between starting and ending point. As the last functionality we will add a button. After an user clicks on the button, our function will calculate the rout and display the distance in kilometers. Let's start with a simple class which we will use to display drop down field and retrieve the coordination of requested place.
Class for retrieving region, city and geolocation
For one of the social platforms I was creating I had to provide profile display according to the location from which the request was made. There are plenty services in the internet, which provide you an accurate database, which will translate IP address into region, city and geographical lengths. I didn't want to spend any money for this kind of service, so I decided to find a free solution for this task. However, none of the services existing in the internet provides you 100% accuracy, the one that I've found locates my IP correctly. It would be nice, if you could give me some feedback, if this class is working for you as good as it works for me. This example requires URL file-access to be enabled on your server, because we will request the XML data through URL call. In this example we will also use SimpleXMLElement class, which should be enable by default in PHP5, to translate our XML file into an object. We will then recurse received object into a suitable array.
Geolocation class – retrieving longitude and latitude using google maps
A while ago I had to prepare a map for a customer. He wanted to be able to use text files with addresses and display them on the map. To be able to do that I had to find a service, which will convert a regular address into geographical longitude and latitude. What would be better than google maps to do that really simple task? I researched a little bit on google and found a really nice way, how to accomplish that.