Google Hackathon part II
The second workshops of google’s hackathon centered around opensourcing mapping applications. None of the top 4 mapping providers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Mapquest, have opensourced their mapping applications. So if you want to develop open source geographically aware applications you need to use open source alternatives like Openstreetmap in combination with OSMA render.
If you want to be able to abstract your map coding from the data provider and / or the tile renderer you can use either OpenLayers, which is an open source JS/UI that works together with open source data providers and tile renderers to create map that can be used within your applicaition, or MapStraction, which is an abstraction layer for other javascript UI’s like Googles or Microsofts mapping applications.
A fun fact was that OpenLayer is often used in combination with Google Maps because it provides better event hooks than the Google API.