Moving to GraphHopper

After GUADEC I decided, in conjunction with my mentor Zeeshan, that Maps should move from OSRM to GraphHopper for fastest route calculations. The main reason for this, among others, is that the public instance of OSRM doesn't support biking or pedestrian transportation profiles¹. Read more about this in my previous blog post.

So the last weeks I've been working on re-implementing the routing in Maps to use GraphHopper instead, but also to accomodate for lessons learned during this time. I'm happy to say that the new code is turning out pretty good and that I because of this actually have a demo to show you.

This shows me searching for a route from somewhere close to New York to Baltimore. Notice how the route changes when I change in which way I want the trip to go.

Next up is resurrecting and finishing the sidebar code I worked on before GUADEC, polish up the markers and post patches to Bugzilla. After that I'll work on testing the code for corner cases and polish the UI even more. Later this fall (after GSoC) I plan on working on adding GTFS support to GraphHopper so that we can get proper public transportation support with wide coverage.

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1: OSRM actually has support for this, the public instance is just not set up for it.