After working for a while with the google maps api you inevitably find yourself with the same problem over and over again. How the hell do you manage a lot of markers and how do you prevent them from overlapping eachother?
Well to that end I googled a bit, thinking there'd be quite a few solutions for that problem by now. Unfortunately that's not so much the case. In fact, there's only a few marker managers out there and only a handfull are concerned with clusters.
I took one,
ClusterMarker and started to make use of it. But you immediately notice a few quirks with the script. First of all there were dollar signs for each variable, making it look very php'ish. There are no dollar signs in javascript as such (although Prototype's $() alias for document.getElementById() is widely accepted) so that was a bit confusing. But there were more signs that a php coder had created this script, not that that's a problem or anything.
No, the problem was that he recomputed all the markers over and over again. That was reaally heavy on a marker set with 500+ markers. So I decided to rewrite that script. And since I was going to rewrite it, I was doing it from scratch.
And so, I did.
You can find the project listed on my project page and the project space at
cm.qfox.nl. There's no real license to it, use it as you will, cred me if you care.