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OP here: This news is dissapointing. I've been using the Google Earth API for years now and while it does feel "bolted on" it's gotten the job done. Sure the updates were slow, and bug fixes/enhancements few in the past couple of years, but it works well. I'm actively looking for an alternative. Here's a brief list of what I've found.

World Wind - http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/ Cesium - http://cesiumjs.org/

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WorldWind is not going to be an option in the browser much longer either. Applet support requires the Java plugin, and that's also going to be affected by the push to deprecate the NPAPI (plus a lot of places have it disabled already due to the ongoing security concerns).

Cesium's excellent. Still missing some features compared to GE and WorldWind, but the core dev team has been cranking away on it consistently, they're very responsive to discussion, and I love being able to dive right down into the source to see how things work inside (as opposed to the giant binary black box that is GE).

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