Collecting Data from Google Maps API

[Christian Antfeld]

For a servlet I want to make I want to collect data on travel times between different locations to group them based on some parameters.  I recently saw the Google Maps API is open to use Google Maps in an application but that's not what I need.  Is there a way to collect the information like distance, arrival times between two addresses, and the like in a purely numeric form?

[Paul Clapham]

Why isn't that what you need? From the Java code in your servlet it's possible to send data (location, address, etc) to the Google Maps API and other Google APIs to produce the data you require.

[Christian Antfeld]

What I mean to say is the description of using the Google Maps API is to embed the Maps GUI but I could be misunderstanding what's being said.  I'm a relative beginner and don't know If I misinterpreted the wording.  

What I want is a text-only set of data returned.  Do you know if that is possible with the Google Maps API?

[Tim Moores]

An API is not a GUI. The Maps API gives you access to all of the geo information without any GUI.

[Paul Clapham]

You have probably seen descriptions where you write JavaScript code which runs in your browser and gets data from Google Maps. But you don't want to do that. Which is fine -- there are other ways to use the Google APIs which don't depend on being called from JavaScript. You would like to use Java, so java google maps is an appropriate set of keyword to use in a web search.

[Christian Antfeld]

Tim Moores wrote:An API is not a GUI. The Maps API gives you access to all of the geo information without any GUI.

An API can make function calls so it COULD cause GUI elements to be drawn on a screen if that functionality is available.  Thanks for the info.