Google Maps and the MarkerClusterer solution

Hi everyone,

today I’ll be writing a small post about a problem that most people who write maps application deal with: add thousands of markers in you map. A known solution to manage your marker is GMarkerManager. However, today I read about the MarkerClusterer solution in GeoGoogleDevelopers Blog.

“MarkerClusterer collects markers into different clusters and displays the number of markers in each cluster with a label, creating new clusters as the map zoom level changes. The clustering algorithm is simple; for each new marker it sees, it either puts it inside a pre-existing cluster, or it creates a new cluster if the marker doesn’t lie within the bounds of any current cluster.”

The effect of using MarkerClusterer is shown in the picture below and library’s sample site:

The library works like magic. You just have to pass your array of markers to the MarkerClusterer constructor, and it ill take care of the rest. First, we have to import the MarkerClusterer JavaScript implementation file. Later, we create some markers, push into the array and call MarkerClusterer, as shown in the code snippet below.

It’s really awesome and straightfoward. Try it yourself.

See you,

–
Fernando