New Routing Frontend

Update: the old interface is turned off. The new one is available at routing.osm.ch

 

There is a new routing user interface for osrm which I am testing at routingnew.osm.ch. I would welcome feedback here as a comment or on the Swiss mailing list.

Why the new interface?

There was no easy way forward. A little background: Last year, we bough some shiny new SSDs to speed up our servers. I decided to install the new Ubuntu 16.04 onto the new disks, the new long term support version. In the mean time, most services are moved to the server with the new Ubuntu and the SSDs, except routing. I couldn’t get our old version of OSRM to run on Ubuntu 16.04, so I was forced to upgrade to the newest version. But a lot was changed in OSRM in the mean time: the API for routing requests as well as the syntax for the routing profiles. That is the main reason why we still run such an old version. The old user interface we used is no longer maintained, therefore incompatible with the current API. But there is a brand new one, which does not support multiple routing profiles. So starting at the hack weekend in Karlsruhe, I hacked the profile selector into the new interface.

The plan is now to switch to the new OSRM and user interface on Sunday, March 19th.

update to umap 0.8

A new version of umap was released a few weeks ago and we have updated our instance at umap.osm.ch to the newest version. New features include:

  • Support for multi polygons
  • A new search interface, returning a list of found places instead of going to the most likely one.
  • Extended editing: For example polygons can now be converted to lines, or lines can be split into several parts.
  • A history of saved states exists, allowing to go back to a previously saved point.
  • The map can now be exported with all its properties and be restored on another instance for example.
  • And many other things have been improved.

Thank you to Yohan Boniface, who is the main developer, for providing us with such a nice tool.