We started by researching the community for components that would fit our use cases. These components, shared by some of our most active community users, were developed in different platform releases and fulfilled different purposes. Some integrated the interactive maps themselves, with specific marker usage scenarios, while others stuck to less complex usage scenarios, such as address translation.

Hoping to make life easier to everybody (including ourselves, of course :) ) we set out to create a component that would contain all the required functionality, while maintaining a good level of flexibility and simplicity for others to build upon.

The end result of this effort is a new component, named "Google Maps". It uses Google's Maps JavaScript API V3 to provide an interactive map experience. It also allows to add markers and directions, as well as event driven functionality, and some other goodies.

In the end, we still used the existing Forge components as inspiration for our own and for that, so we would like to thank the community for their input, especially the 'Google Maps by LxIS' and ‘Google GeoCoding’ components. You guys rock!