I'm attempting to draw many circles (around 1000) on a google map, at various locations and sizes, and then binding a click event to them. But this many calls of new google.maps.Circle(parameters); makes the page loading slow, and sometimes it just hangs forever, so I'd like to figure out if there's a better/faster way to accomplish what I'm trying to do.
I see that there's something called a kml layer, but there doesn't appear to be any easy way to draw filled circles with it and I'm not sure if I can still bind click events to each individual circle in the layer or not.
Looking at the circle workaround on the google KML faq page, I'm not sure if generating a KML file that contains thousands of circles similar to this would end up saving any time.
I also have no idea how to go about generating this kml file.
Finally, take into consideration that I'm pulling the circles I'm attempting to draw from a database, so I'd either have to generate the KML file on the fly for use or generate a new file every time a circle is removed or added from the DB so that the file stays up to date.
Of course, if there's another alternative, I'm all ears!
With the help of others via the Google Maps API v3 Group, I was able to implement a map overlay that handles 10,000 points suprisingly well. The trick is to use a canvas tile overlay, which minimizes the number of DOM elements in exchange for much simpler/lighter-weight POJsOs (plain old JavaScript objects).
Demo page w/mouse click events (API v2 only): http://notebook.kulchenko.com/maps/datamark
Demo page w/cursor swapping (API v2 and v3): http://notebook.kulchenko.com/maps/gridmark