jQuery Geo is a jQuery plugin, which means it is 100% JavaScript and ties into the popular jQuery library. It helps make interacting with various web mapping servers and tile sets such as Open Street Map, MapBox, WMS, and Esri ArcGIS Server as simple as possible.
Internally, Applied Geographics, Inc. has been developing a JavaScript mapping component over the last five years or so and are proud to give our reasearch to the open-source community.
Our intention is to be a simple & fast approach to a decent percentage of the spatial web's needs.
The primary component of our geospatial plugin is a single user interface widget that pulls in tiled or dynamic map images from map servers. By default, this component targets Open Street Map data as tiles rendered by mapquest open but can be easilly configured to use other cached tile sets and/or dynamic services.
The map widget includes only what is required to show mapping data and handle direct user interaction with the map. The rest can be handled programmatically by the web developer and any other UI framework they choose, e.g., showing and hiding services, changing the widget's mode, hooking into an external zoom bar, etc.
Apart from the widget, jQuery Geo has useful geospatial functions in the $.geo namespace. These functions help you calculate bounding boxes, measure the distance between geometries, determine if one geometry contains another, and other functions you might find in the well-known Java Topology Suite. They are all implemented in JavaScript and are included with the rest of jQuery Geo.