Universal Mind Helps MapQuest Navigate a Geospatial Migration

A world-class provider of online maps discovered the most direct route to the community of Flash developers looking to integrate rich geospatial services into their third-party applications.

As a leading source of online maps and driving directions, few names are better known than MapQuest. Also well known are many of the more than 1400 global organizations — in key industries such as travel and hospitality, directories/local search, retail, real estate healthcare, banking, insurance and asset tracking — that offer MapQuest-powered maps and directions from their own websites.

These business customers represent a significant part of MapQuest’s total business and are supported by a dedicated unit called MapQuest Business Solutions. Currently Business Solutions serves more than one billion maps and routes each month from the MapQuest platform. Based on the platform — which applications access through the MapQuest Advantage™ API — companies can provide for their own customers all the same mapping, routing, geocoding, and search features that consumers rely on from MapQuest’s website.

A big part of the value promise — both for MapQuest and its business customers — is the quality of the experience for consumers when accessing these solutions. A prime example is an application for a logistics company that tracks the locations of hundreds of vehicles across the U.S. The application should launch immediately in the browser window; points of interest, maps and routes should refresh rapidly; and animations and graphics should be rich and compelling.

To provide that quality of experience, MapQuest Business Solutions called in Universal Mind to implement the Advantage API in Adobe’s ActionScript 3.0. This would enable developers to build rich applications with Adobe Flex or Adobe Flash and still leverage all the tools, functionality, and training investment of the existing Advantage API’s JavaScript implementation.

Objectives of the project included:

• Increased Performance - MapQuest’s business customers could write more complex programs that perform efficiently and responsively
• Enhanced Interactivity - They could create compelling Flash animations and graphics or quickly render multitudes of custom points, lines and shapes to display points of interest, routes or physical boundaries
• Lower Development Costs - Applications could be built in a language that allows for developer productivity and ease of implementation
• Faster Time to Market - Business customers could enjoy the benefits of leveraging Adobe Flash Player, the lightweight and robust runtime that works across multiple operating systems and browsers allowing for ease of deployment and shorter development time.

MapQuest Business Solutions hired Universal Mind because of the company’s ability to deploy a development team that could deliver the solution required within the project’s parameters of time, functionality, and application performance.

“Universal Mind gave us an extremely fast ActionScript implementation” states Antony Pegg, Senior Product Manager of MapQuest Platform Services. “Applications perform very quickly and so did the Universal Mind team. And, thanks in part to Universal Mind, we have features and functionality our competitors don’t.”

Using the new Advantage API that Universal Mind implemented in AcitonScript, one MapQuest Business Solutions customer was able to cut display refresh time from 30 seconds to under a second for its logistics application.

An example of the several enhancements that Universal Mind provided is one feature called “Flash maps under JavaScript,or FUJAX” Pegg says.

“Universal Mind took the Java Script API, hollowed it out, compiled an equivalent Flash API, and put it underneath the Java Script API. So, if somebody is programming in JavaScript, it’s actually a Flash map that they’re getting which behaves the same in all browsers because its running within the Flash player with all the benefits and features of the ActionScript API” Unlike a more traditional API, in Flash an entire Window can display just once and only needs to refresh particular data points as they are updated saving critical seconds.

Another industry-leading enhancement is Smooth Zoom, equivalent to what a user might experience when looking through a zoom lens, and an alternative to the “step-by-step” zoom familiar to online map users. Universal Mind also implemented a “Global View” which allows users to see maps from a three-dimensional perspective as if looking down from space.

A Lighter Implementation Yields Faster Performance

Working hand-in-hand with the MapQuest development team, Universal Mind provided many valuable architectural suggestions that led to product advancements and improved performance. As an example, when asked to meet the objective of an ActionScipt based API that offers all the same benefits as the existing JavaScript API, Universal Mind could have chosen the easy, less challenging path. Instead of adding the entire Flex class libraries, which would have greatly increased the size of the API and slowed performance, Universal Mind re-implemented the entire existing JavaScript capabilities in native ActionScript 3 that leverages the latest technologies from Adobe including Flash 9 player and Flex. The result is an API that enables MapQuest to offers its customers a very solid, high performing solution.

Of particular importance to MapQuest Business Solutions is the ability to offer this enhanced performance to customers and still maintain compatibility with existing tools and services.

States Pegg: “I think that it helps all our customers who struggle with a whole set of browser compatibility and performance issues related to client-side development — such as trying to include 500 to 1000 points of interest onto a map and expecting it to perform on a browser. To eliminate theses issues and still leverage the developer’s JavaScript knowledge is fantastic. We can in fact maintain previous code with only a few minor updates where there are particular nuances. That preserves our investment and our customers in both code and skills.”

Project success, of course, ultimately drives business success. According to Pegg, reactions from customers to the recent technical enhancements have been extremely positive. And because Universal Mind could produce those enhancements quickly, they represent a significant market advantage for MapQuest.

“By introducing a robust API for ActionScript, we've been able to open doors to new business.”