A Comparison of Maps Application Programming Interfaces

TL;DR

This paper compares the usability of three popular web mapping APIs by analyzing their size and implementation differences, providing insights for developers choosing an API for geo-referenced web applications.

Contribution

It offers a systematic comparison of Google Maps, ArcGIS, and OpenLayers APIs focusing on usability metrics and API specifications, highlighting size differences and implementation impacts.

Findings

Google Maps API is significantly smaller than others.

API size influences development complexity and usability.

Comparison methodology combines implementation and specification analysis.

Abstract

The development of web applications that manipulate geo-referenced information is often supported by Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), al-lowing a fast development cycle for high quality applications. APIs can be used by programmers with different expertise levels and choosing an adequate API may have a dramatic impact on the productivity achieved by those programmers. Our goal is to compare maps APIs with respect to their usability. We compare three different APIs: the Google Maps JavaScript API, the ArcGIS API for JavaScript, and the OpenLayers JavaScript Mapping Library. Our comparison is supported by a set of software metrics and is performed in two orthogonal ways: the comparison of three implementations of the same system prototype, each using one of the APIs under scrutiny; the comparison of the APIs specifications. The main results of the study are related to the size of the APIs, with the Google API being significantly smaller than the others.