gnome-maps Notes on routing

[Jussi Kukkonen <jku goto fi>]

(let's try again from a subscribed address)

Hi,

FYI, I did a little testing with OSRM routing over the weekend:
https://github.com/jku/gnome-maps/tree/wip/osrm-routing . It's not
integrated into Maps at all yet, just javascript that prints a list of
turn directions and plots the route on a champlain view. It's the
first GNOME-style javascript I've ever written so don't expect too
much -- I've tried to copy the style from existing code but may have
cargoculted things unnecessarily.

Some notes so far:

I was initially impressed with the quality of the OSRM routing. Doing
more tests has shown multiple problems -- as an example "no
thoroughfare" access restriction is not taken into account and
motorway junctions are not properly handled. Following these
instructions without the map would be difficult, but I still think
they are useful. Hopefully OSRM improves at same speed as OSM itself.

If anyone (Mattias?) has studied other routing services and thinks we
might be better off with something else, now would be a good time to
point that out. I'm reasonably happy with the API and am ready to
accept the quality of the results for now, but my testing is
definitely not geographically or quantitatively extensive.

The next step would be to integrate the routing into Maps: For this,
the text search really should support street addresses but it does not
seem to do so currently. Have I missed something or does geocode-glib
really use a service that does not support street addresses?

-- 
 Jussi