Make a Web Mapping App with Routing and Place Search: Tutorial

“We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there”; an excerpt from Jerry Reed’s classic record “Eastbound and Down”. Within those lyrics resides a deeper story of managing time and distance across the roads of America. There were no data hubs in Jerry’s days of trucking and fleet management. There were no ways of saving time beyond those that could be thought up on a whim.

The infrastructure now is much different of course. In today’s world, knowing the road that lies ahead is essential for business efficiency across several industries. Fleet management; retail logistics; sales teams that move around the country; local governments; and road maintenance crews are just a few examples of organizations who benefit from tightly managing their travels.

ThinkGeo Cloud Routing is a great way to inject that much-needed data into your own apps, as it offers really fast route calculation for North America (U.S., Canada and Mexico) plus much of Central America. So, let’s see how we can use the ThinkGeo Cloud to build a routing web app that lets us discover the world around our route, and gives us access to important point-of-interest data that can fuel our trips.

Before we get started with the code, let’s grab a ThinkGeo Cloud API key, which we’ll use to authenticate our requests to the ThinkGeo Cloud API. To get your own API key, you’ll need to sign up for a free ThinkGeo Cloud account at https://cloud.thinkgeo.com which takes just a few seconds. If you get stuck here, ThinkGeo has a handy tutorial video that can get you jump-started.

Now let’s do this.