ARD Map API
Need to develop a software system capable of provide personalized maps about places and local businesses in any city. In order to do this, a Map API is needed to provide location-aware infographics, mind maps and visualization aids. We need and API which includes geocoding, geolocation, directions and navigation, touch-screen interaction, popups and customizable control objects.
Some team members have already used the Google Maps API in other projects. This is one of the decisive advantages, since it facilitates the development of the web application. Furthermore, it is a very famous API, with a great and complete documentation, that provides a lot of information and code examples, this provides us with tutorials and assures us of its reliability.
Also it provides a very important series of features that perfectly adapt to the requirements of LoMap:
- Directions: provides a route planner with an estimate of how much time the route takes and can include additional locations the user wants to travel through.
- Places: helps users find points of interest, whether that's a landmark or tourist attraction, a public building such as a school or hospital, or a restaurant or shop. Also provides the possibility of adding reviews or comments to those points of interest.
- Geocoding: allows to accurately mark locations on maps, by converting between street addresses latitude and longitude coordinates.
- Data layers: lets the user personalize or overlay own data on the map.
Apart from Google Maps API, we also considered these other options:
- MapBox API.
- Geopify API. Both of them were temporarily discarded because of the familiarity of Google Maps. However, we remark temporarily since we plan to implement an adapter pattern that lets us change the used Map API if we consider it necessary.