Osrm-backend: Remove geojson, go polyline only

Created on 27 Feb 2017 · 4Comments · Source: Project-OSRM/osrm-backend

I think we should remove geojson responses and only go with polylines.

Arguments for removal:

Polylines are way faster to transfer, especially with big responses the cost of serializing and transferring geojson is huge.
There are easy to use polyline encoders available for all major platforms.
Removing parameter and code paths makes OSRM leaner and easier to develop.

Arguments against removal:

For developers to get started, Geojson is easier to work with than Polyline
There is confusion around the polyline coordinate order (it's lat,lon instead of the lon,lat we use everywhere. This is usually not a problem when developers use libraries for parsing the polyline.
There is confusion around polyline precision, but since we switched to the standard precision 5 this should be fine now.

/cc @TheMarex

Source

freenerd

👎2

Most helpful comment

Hi. Please, do not remove GeoJSON support. I think, that you underestimate what this format means for other developers! I want to add several additional arguments, against removal:

MapBox quick visualization tool geojson.io supports only geoJSON. So it is hard to debug geometry in the response without it.
Many GIS application has native GeoJSON support instead of polyline (QGIS, JSOM and many others)
You can parse GeoJSON in python without additional libraries, and can not polyline.
OSRM server returns JSON encoded answer. It is logical to have a complete JSON response.

By the way. Where you switched to precision 5? I found only precision 6 in sources. https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/blob/master/include/util/coordinate.hpp#L43

gardster on 3 Mar 2017

👍8

All 4 comments

If you're concerned with response sizes and making OSRM leaner we should talk about

No JSON only C++ types in the libosrm API https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/issues/2029
node-osrm bindings can then decide on response format and e.g. also provide Protobuf blobs

daniel-j-h on 27 Feb 2017

👍1

Hi. Please, do not remove GeoJSON support. I think, that you underestimate what this format means for other developers! I want to add several additional arguments, against removal:

MapBox quick visualization tool geojson.io supports only geoJSON. So it is hard to debug geometry in the response without it.
Many GIS application has native GeoJSON support instead of polyline (QGIS, JSOM and many others)
You can parse GeoJSON in python without additional libraries, and can not polyline.
OSRM server returns JSON encoded answer. It is logical to have a complete JSON response.

By the way. Where you switched to precision 5? I found only precision 6 in sources. https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/blob/master/include/util/coordinate.hpp#L43

gardster on 3 Mar 2017

👍8

@gardster internally everything is precision 6, but when we emit polyline we support the google format of precision 5. We also have polyline6 which gives you the full internal precision.