Question

I’m making an app that uses Google’s Places API. After querying, you get a places object. places.geometry.location contains the longitude and latitude of the place. You can see them each stored there under random variable names, like $a and yY, for example.

The official way to access these values is through location.lat() and location.lng(). I’m curious as to why they use methods, rather than fixed values. Additionally, do they use random variable names to keep people from accessing them directly?

Answer 1

The Google code is obfuscated / minimized and uses short variable names that can change from one day to another.

So that’s why you use methods to retrieve their values.