When Google Maps go bad…

This week I noticed that a number of google maps had stopped working out of the blue, not dying in a spectacular javascript car crash, just a subdued failure and no map.

Looking in Firefox error console I see G_MAP_TYPE is not defined; – WTF? it was working…

Well looking into it, it is an easy fix. It seems that a lot of people (myself included) have been using depreceated constant names for the maps types, and that there will be quite a few Javascript Plugins (for things like jQuery) that may need updating.

The usual (i.e. correct) types we should now be using now are:

Old Constant name New Constant Name Description
G_MAP_TYPE G_NORMAL_MAP This map type (which is the default) displays a normal street map.
G_SATELLITE_TYPE G_SATELLITE_MAP This map type displays satellite images.
G_HYBRID_TYPE G_HYBRID_MAP This map type displays a transparent layer of major streets on satellite images.
  G_PHYSICAL_MAP

This map type displays maps with physical features such as terrain and vegetation. This map type is not displayed within map type controls by default. (Since 2.94)

See: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/reference.html#GMapType

For a bit of an actual explanation I found this post on Google Groups