Do you remember Foursquare, Facebook places and Google location? Then you are probably familiar with location based services. If you have a website and you have been wondering how you can integrate place-related information to it, the solution is here. Nokia has just released the Ovi Places API in alpha mode.
What is Ovi Places API?
Ovi Places API is a public framework that allows you to incorporate location-related information in you websites. The API is currently distributed as a small and single Javascript library file along with style sheets (CSS) and this makes it easy for you to be able to attach to a web page.
With the Ovi Places API, you get access to:
- tens of millions of places worldwide
- rich content associated with places
- powerful tools to discover places
- UI components which speed up your development and
- more control than any available places API
What are the main features?
The main features of Ovi Places API are:
- a search facility that allows website user to find places
- support for different views of place data
- an open, simple and data-centric API
- support for place search
- a highly extensible architecture that
- supports easy customization of what data are displayed and how they are displayed
- consists of multiple components and supports easy creation of new custom components if needed
How you you starting using Ovi Places API?
To start displaying data relating to a place (location) via the Places API, you need to create an instance of the class nokia.places.Place and tell it which place you are interested in and where to render (display) the data. You will need to follow the 3 steps below:
- include Ovi Places API Javascript library file inside the <head> element of your webpage
- Inside the page <body>, add a <div> element and set its id attribute and
- Add a script tag for the code that creates a Place instance.
