Google Maps API rate limiting and Google App Engine again

@bFlood : Maps Premium is an expensive service usually used by not public-facing, password protected Web sites, while what we are talking about here is the free Google Maps service, where G is penalizing all Apps running on top of GAE since they have to share the ip addresses pool of GAE ip adresses.
@Ikai : what you write applies to old maps (V2) API where you can obtain an application authorization key and applications are rate limited based on this key, although I feel that some kind of ip based limitations exists also.
Maps V3 which is the way to go especially for mobile appls, do not require an application key, instead there are rate limitations based just on originating IP addresses, this puts GAE based appls on a disadvantage since we have to share this with all other GAE based appls using the service.
(see : post publised in App Engine group)

World Countries and IP geocoding API for App Engine

I have been writing here again and again about the inherent problem that App Engine based Applications have in using third party API’s with quota limits based on ip addresses since all of those are served from the same block of ips alocated by Google  © and therefore have to share those quotas with other applications hosted on App Engine using the same service.

Today I am happy to offer a free IP geocoding and world countries information service API and hope this solves to some extend the problem of Server side IP geocoding for fellow App Engine developers.

Detailed service description and more information is provided here : "World countries API"

Happy coding:-)

App Engine & Google Geocoding Service II

This issue comes and goes in this thread all the time.
I also suggested in the past to delegate the job to the client since I
could't see a scenario where we use server side request and be within
the TOR's.
see here : http://gaengine.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-maps-api-quotas-and-app-engine.html
I was wrong. Recently I run into a case where I had to do this and
still I am sure I am within legal limits, this is so when you need the
geolocation service in order to publish a static map served from
Google.
So this is a real problem and the issue has to be resolved somehow,
although I think we are discussing this in the wrong group. IMO that
this is an issue for the maps group and we should adress it there.
Happy coding:-)

Update :For an alternative solution you can take a look here.

Google Maps API quotas and App Engine

There is a lot of talk in various forums that I follow about Maps API quota limits.
To summarize: there is a limit of  2500 requests per day per requesting IP (see: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html) , if your application issues those requests from any server you can reach this limit quite fast. The situation is much worst if your application is based in GAE then it has to share those quotas with any other application in GAE that happens to use the same  API since all those applications are served from a limited number of google IP's making the API useless.
So far so bad except ...  there is a solution, delegate the job to the client using JSON & JS. This way :
a) quotas are calculated against your user's IP and more probably than not he will never exceed those.
b) you offload some workload from your server.
c) save some bandwidth.
Practically  I can't see a scenario where we can't use client side, since whatever we do we have to use the results only in connection with a Google map according to Maps TOS para 10.12 (unless of course you opt for the premier edition).

Google Maps API V3

Some good news about API's now.
Today Google has released a new version of v3 maps API today, with a nice surprise this time it has included a badly needed feature, Poly-lines and Polygon overlays !.

Google Maps API V3 (part II)

Glad to see that my bug issue report mentioned in a previous post was verified, accepted and fixed by Google's developers team in ZERO time (whole process took less than 1 working day). This tells me a lot about the quality of their work.
It is a pity that I have to revisit my code now and remove the work around I devised.
Lesson learned: If you run into a bug and you are damn sure it is a real bug and not your lousy code causing the problem do not hesitate, fill a report and wait a little before you start waisting your time devising a work around.

Google Maps API V3

I was doing some work with  Google Maps API V3 during last couple of weeks,
and here are some of my experience with this version.

• Very small footprint and quite fast.
• Although in Beta I think it is quite stable to be used in production - if of course you are ready to follow with latest developments and fixings.
• A small but annoying bug I discovered (for which I filled a ticket : http://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=1643 along with a work around)
• A tip : Since there is no way to hide-show the zoom - pan and Map type selection controls through api you have do it by writing some javascript 

        var housediv=yourmapObject.getDiv();
        if (housediv.childNodes[3]) { 
            housediv.childNodes[3].className = myClass 
            housediv.childNodes[4].className = myClass 
        } 
         // if exist 
        //controls reside in childnode[3] and [4] of container div 
        //rest is done with CSS class where you can hide-show or change the opacity