Lines as Long as You Like
Wyatt Baldwin
speeding up the display of long route lines (i.e., the line marking a
route on the trip planner map). Previously, long route lines would
take a long time to show up, and when a line was too long, it just
wouldn't show up at all, possibly crashing the user's browser.
Obviously not good.
What happened was, I got notification of a donation and saw that the
person making the donation lives in Beaverton. I tried getting a route
from Beaverton to downtown Portland, but the route never came up
because the line was too long. I felt bad that someone had made a
donation but might not even be able to get directions over a
relatively short distance, so I got to work on fixing the problem.
So, skipping over the technical aspects***, I'll just say that now it
should be possible to get a route of just about any length. It still
takes a while to generate a really long route, but once the route info
gets back to the user's browser, the line drawing is almost
instantaneous. Even for short routes there's a noticeable speedup.
This has been bugging me for a long time, so I'm glad it's finally
fixed. As usual, if you notice any problems, please let us know****.
* Big thanks to Rebecca in Beaverton.
** http://bycycle.org/2007/04/20/scroll-wheel-zooming-added talks
about doing this about a month ago
*** http://trac.bycycle.org/browser/core/trunk/byCycle/model/glineenc.py
contains Python code for encoding Google Maps polylines
**** http://bycycle.org/contact