The Freemap blog, revisited

As mentioned in my last post I was aiming for March 1st to make the kothic-based Freemap 0.6 the current version. It is indeed in more or less a working state, and is compatible with all the main current browsers (even IE9). However, I have made a reasonable amount of progress on routing in the last week or so and would like to implement the “intelligent walking routes” functionality in which you can draw a walking route on the map and, using Freemap annotations and description tags in the underlying data, auto-generate a walking route.

In order for 0.6 to be a significant advance over the current version, I am therefore delaying moving 0.6 over to www.free-map.org.uk until a first pass at the walking route functionality is completed. This is likely, hopefully, to be during March. However in the meantime, you can access 0.6 at www.free-map.org.uk/0.6; bear in mind it is a work in progress and may occasionally not function correctly if I’m testing something.

BTW I’m likely to be using libosmscout rather than pgRouting; tests on pgRouting have revealed one or two issues, for example you cannot route from point to point, only segment to segment (try the “walk route” option on 0.6 as it is at the moment to see what I mean). libosmscout, however, allows node to node routing and is quite amazingly fast, calculating a route from Fernhurst to Southampton, some 30 miles, instantaneously.

Have been continuing to do a few things with the new, kothic-js based Freemap 0.6, which, like the current version of Freemap (0.5) now features search and annotation facilities. There are still a few issues, rendering can be rather slow if the server is loaded or the client machine is busy, and some odd rendering artefacts occasionally occur (such as the underlying canvas tiles occasionally not being blanked if you change location): but the underlying map data is being kept up to date and a kothic-based system will be more sustainable than the raster solution and so overall I think it’s time to switch.

This means that from March 1st, barring disaster, Freemap 0.6 will become the default version and the 0.5 source code will be archived as a downloadable tarball. Being canvas-based it will require an HTML5-compatible browser, but this does include current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer (and at this point I would like to comment on what an improvement IE9 is over earlier versions). I would also like to thank Chris Jones at SUCS for helping to keep Freemap going in the past year or two through his very generous offer of hosting the tiles. With improvements to kothic-js doubtless in the pipeline (there is talk of client-side caching which should resolve performance problems) I’m now fairly convinced that this is the way to go.

This will of course not be a final version of 0.6; many features in 0.5 such as walking routes will not initially be present. It is my hope to add in a new, pgRouting based walking routes feature, time permitting as always.

With the move to vector rendering on the web client, I am also looking to make changes to Freemap’s Android app OpenTrail too and switch from osmdroid to the vector-based Mapsforge. At the moment this does not allow custom styles but the upcoming 0.3 release, due at the end of this month apparently, will.

Have finally got round to moving Freemap source to github. Would not say I’m an expert on it by any means, as I’ve only just started using git, but you can find the repository here: https://github.com/nickw1/Freemap. This means that the existing SVN repository will no longer be maintained.