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Google Maps vs RAML: What are the differences?
Developers describe Google Maps as "Build highly customisable maps with your own content and imagery". Create rich applications and stunning visualisations of your data, leveraging the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of Google Maps and a modern web platform that scales as you grow. On the other hand, RAML is detailed as "RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing". RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing. It's concise - you only write what you need to define - and reusable. It is machine readable API design that is actually human friendly.
Google Maps belongs to "Mapping APIs" category of the tech stack, while RAML can be primarily classified under "API Tools".
Some of the features offered by Google Maps are:
- Maps Image APIs
- Places API
- Web Services
On the other hand, RAML provides the following key features:
- Create and pull in namespaced, reusable libraries, containing data types
- Annotations let you add vendor specific functionality without compromising your spec
- Traits and resource Types let you take advantage of code reuse and design patterns
"Free" is the primary reason why developers consider Google Maps over the competitors, whereas "API Specification" was stated as the key factor in picking RAML.
According to the StackShare community, Google Maps has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1976 company stacks & 1093 developers stacks; compared to RAML, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.
From a StackShare Community member: "We're a team of two starting to write a mobile app. The app will heavily rely on maps and this is where my partner and I are not seeing eye-to-eye. I would like to go with an open source solution like OpenStreetMap that is used by Apple & Foursquare. He would like to go with Google Maps since more apps use it and has better support (according to him). Mapbox is also an option but I don’t know much about it."
I use Mapbox because We need 3D maps and navigation, it has a great plugin for React and React Native which we use. Also the Mapbox Geocoder is great.
I use OpenStreetMap because that has a strong community. It takes some time to catch up with Google Maps, but OpenStreetMap will become great solution.
Google Maps is best because it is practically free (they give you $300 in free credits per month and it's really hard to go over the free tier unless you really mean business) and it's the best!
I use Google Maps because it has a lot of great features such as Google's rich APIs, geolocation functions, navigation search feature, street map view, auto-generated 3D city map.
I use OpenStreetMap because i have the control of the environment, using Docker containers or bare-metal servers.
Pros of Google Maps
- Free253
- Address input through maps api136
- Sharable Directions82
- Google Earth47
- Unique46
- Custom maps designing3
Pros of RAML
- API Specification15
- Human Readable7
- API Documentation6
- Design Patterns & Code Reuse3
- API Modeling2
- Automatic Generation of Mule flow2
- Unit Testing2
- API Mocking1
- SDK Generation1
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Cons of Google Maps
- Google Attributions and logo4
- Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete1
