Releasing GraphHopper 0.3 – Plan Your Outdoor Trips Beyond Two Dimensions

Today we are happy to finally release version 0.3 of GraphHopper – the Open Source road routing engine. Here is a screenshot showing our slightly polished UI

It shows a route result where elevation was enabled. Try it yourself at GraphHopper Maps or see the variety of already implemented use cases!

Highlights:

• You can easily enable elevation and Graphhopper will not only automatically import and display this, but you can actually use it for routing! E.g. for bike routing hills will be avoided. But also even for horse-routing.
• GraphHopper runs on Raspberry Pi and even in the Browser!
• GraphHopper is now available in 19 languages! See here for the details.
• A more powerful and compact API, including GPX support with turn instructions and elevation information.
• The address suggestions is done via photon and is available as part of our Web Routing API which is currently in closed alpha.

Thanks a lot to all contributors: NopMap, ratrun, konsoletyper, dardin88, lmar and b3nn0. And all the translators!

Details:

• You can store two weights per edge (dependent on the direction) – this allows using GraphHopper for interesting new use cases:
  • Biking and hiking tours can now avoid hills as up- and down-hill speed can be different.
  • With traffic data you can make routing more precise as speed values has to be different for the two directions.
• To make use of this new feature we implemented to read elevation data. For now only hgt files are supported but more will follow. This makes GraphHopper different to many routing engine, especially because we can scale with elevation to world wide coverage (although elevation data is only available for +-60°).
• The elevation Leaflet widget from MrMufflon is very useful and has a nice dragging feature
• Support to read OSM relations like for biking routes and overall improved bike routes as it is easier to tweak them
• Support for more than 2 points – still we need an improved UI to use this feature
• A new web API format which improves compactness and introduces the new but optional 3rd dimension. Additionally it makes it possible to retrieve the sub-path geometry for every turn instruction. See the documentation.
• Upgraded the Android demo to the latest mapsforge 0.4.3, and a further fix of an ugly bug
• Support to make it possible to click on instructions and see them on the map. Additionally navigation software can now easier find the next instruction
• Lots of the documentation is now in the source, which is better for the user to have up-to-date information. Or where it is possible to look at old docs too.
• and a lot more bug fixes …

Last but not least some months ago there was an article about GraphHopper in the Java Magazine and a session at FOSDEM. Did I mention that you should check out our enterprise offers 😉 ? Feel free to join our mailing list or follow us!

Have fun!