route-me overview
Jan Christiansen
I am new to route-me and I wonder whether anyone can give me a short overview of the forks of route-me? That is, do the forks differ with respect to stability? Do any of the forks provide additional features? Furthermore, there seem to be a lot of open issues. Is closing most of them mere a matter of man power or are there fundamental problems? I would also be very grateful for short experience reports with respect to stability.
Thanks,
Jan
shenstech
While I can't speak too much about the larger picture of route-me in
terms of closing open issues, and about the forks, I'll give you my
experience with using route-me. It's definitely a framework that is
mature enough for commercial products, as myself and a few others have
used it for. It supports a decent amount of map sources (all of which
are easy to plug into), and although the source type I needed wasn't
included I had few issues integrating it myself. I'm not sure if you
have tested any of the sample projects yourself, but the actual usage
of the framework is slick, and as far as the basic features go (slippy
map, map markers and path drawing, etc.), route-me does them just as
well as I imagine anyone would need them to. Also, I began
development on a iPhone 3G running 3.1.3, and have tested on
everything up to a iPad 2 running 4.3.3 and a 4S running 5.0.1, and
have had zero issues between devices.
As far as the forks go, from what I've seen on this mailing list a lot
of people have discussed and implemented methods for displaying
multiple tilesets, overlaying them and such, so I imagine that's a
decent amount of the activity on github. The only issue I've had is
with path drawing. Even my iPad 2 and my 4S can't handle more than
10-15 separate paths, comprised of 10-25 points each, without some
stutter. While this may have been dealt with in recent updates, I'm
always cautious about upgrading such a tightly ingrained framework in
one of my apps.
So, hopefully that helps you out a bit. When I started development on
my map app almost a year ago there was nothing that compared to the
ease of integration, maturity, and open licensing nature of route-me
and I doubt that anything has come along since (but can't guarantee
it!), and I would definitely give my recommendation.
Stephan
Justin R. Miller
I've been using the core Route-Me since mid-2010 and have shipped a
pretty much app on it in that time:
http://mapbox.com/ipad
I've looked here and there at occasional forks, but the only one I've
spent any serious time on in is the Alpstein one:
https://github.com/Alpstein/route-me
I've ported over several tile backends that I wrote for core (MBTiles,
TileStream, MapQuest-OSM) as well as contributed a few things here and
there.
The Alpstein port is a pretty major refactor that bases everything on
a UIScrollView-contained CATiledLayer-backed view which has amazing
performance over the core and is a lot like Apple's MapKit. While it's
not perfect, it's in pretty active development right now. I'm using it
in this project:
https://github.com/incanus/Mapresent
I have dual goals of releasing this app, as well as along the way
getting familiar and determining how difficult it will be to port the
first app over to Alpstein as well. For me, this will involve
absorbing some custom functionality into the new structure, as well as
likely moving from a manually-layered multi-view approach to the tile
compositing used by Alpstein.
All in all, I'm still on the fence as to whether to endorse that
Alpstein become the future of Route-Me (as mentioned once a while back
here: http://groups.google.com/group/route-me-map/browse_frm/thread/a5652eeb8b2a99c5/0687309e3d92a647)
but I think it's a pretty strong candidate. That said, it does take a
more aggressive upgrade path, as it requires iOS 4+ through the use of
GCD for some things (including a patch to tile compositing that I
contributed to fetch remote tiles concurrently).
--
Justin R. Miller
Development Seed, Inc.
jus...@developmentseed.org
Jan Christiansen
On Feb 15, 2012, at 3:09 PM, shenstech wrote:
> The only issue I've had is
> with path drawing. Even my iPad 2 and my 4S can't handle more than
> 10-15 separate paths, comprised of 10-25 points each, without some
> stutter. While this may have been dealt with in recent updates, I'm
> always cautious about upgrading such a tightly ingrained framework in
> one of my apps.
can anybody confirm that drawing complex paths is still an issue? Is there an alternative of using RMPath to display complex path on top of a map?
> So, hopefully that helps you out a bit.
Thanks very much, this information is quite helpful.
Cheers, Jan
shenstech
I hope you weren't confused or misunderstood what I said. What route-
me has issues with is multiple paths being displayed at once. For
example, I work on a bus app, so occasionally I'll want to show an
area and all the routes in that area, with different colors. However,
a single complex path (I'm pretty sure I tested this with over a
thousand points) shouldn't give you any issues.
Stephan
Jan Christiansen
On Feb 16, 2012, at 5:37 PM, shenstech wrote:
> I hope you weren't confused or misunderstood what I said. What route-
> me has issues with is multiple paths being displayed at once. For
> example, I work on a bus app, so occasionally I'll want to show an
> area and all the routes in that area, with different colors. However,
> a single complex path (I'm pretty sure I tested this with over a
> thousand points) shouldn't give you any issues.
Thanks for the clarification and excuse me for being very imprecise. When I said "complex path" I had several paths with multiple points in mind. In my case I am interested in displaying five to ten paths where each path might have a hundred points. If I am getting into trouble displaying these I will best come back with more questions. Thanks again.
Jan Christiansen
On Feb 15, 2012, at 7:13 PM, Justin R. Miller wrote:
> I've looked here and there at occasional forks, but the only one I've
> spent any serious time on in is the Alpstein one:
>
> https://github.com/Alpstein/route-me
thanks very much, I will definitely have a look at it.
Cheers, Jan