Google Maps Web Components
This has been lurking in my feed reader for a while, but it’s still worth sharing: Google offers a new set of Web Components to compose and add basic maps applications to websites, removing the need to write extensive JavaScript.
The basic example shows how to add a map with a marker to a website:
<gmp-map
style="height: 500px;"
center="41.081736,29.009206"
zoom="10"
map-id="DEMO_MAP_ID"
>
<gmp-advanced-marker
position="41.081736,29.009206"
title="Istanbul"
></gmp-advanced-marker>
</gmp-map>
More interactive maps can be built with auxiliary components for buttons, layout and overlays.
This is a positive development: Web Components allow developers to add basic map functionality to websites without resorting to additional frameworks with potentially heavy footprints. I’d like to see more proposals like this.
Open-source alternatives are available (for OpenLayers) or have not seen significant development in recent years (for Leaflet).