Zoomable political world map

I'm looking to add an map to my application, which would have a world map with different coloured countries, States (in the US) and Provinces (in Canada). The user should be able zoom in to see details, as the scale for seeing the whole world isn't suitable for seeing details in Europe say. The colours would need to be programmed from my application, so a simple image map isn't appropriate.

Obviously the first place to look was Google, but Google Maps doesn't seem to be able to colour code countries. Google Charts can, but produces a single image, which isn't zoomable.

Am I wrong about google, or is there another way that I can use to produce a suitable map? It's a ruby on rails app, so anything which is ruby specific is fine, but ideally n开发者_开发问答ot any other language though if it's the only way, then it's the only way.

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I developed jVectorMap for such visualizations.

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Django has geo-django; If you want to do feature rich GIS web apps with Rails, you’re gonna have to assemble the pieces yourself.

Google maps is a good client, you can use overlays. You need the GIS data to generate the overlay polygons.