Incendia TrailBlaze

01 Nov
Dan's picture

I'm very excited to be able to talk to you about our next major Flex / Drupal application that is coming soon. TrailBlaze is going to be a best in class trail discovery and planning tool that will be like a hiking, biking, running etc route planner on steroids! Some of the features will include:Trail Blaze!

  • Ability to upload and view GPX routes on google maps
  • Ability to plan and plot routes directly on google maps
  • Various google maps features (location finder, trail markers, etc)
  • Ability to attach notes to route markers
  • Ability to attach pictures and video onto trails you upload and share!
  • Ability to plan routes with friends and/or groups
  • Search by location / proximity etc.
  • View your trails, recent community uploaded trails, most popular, most hiked, etc
  • Utilities such as pedometer / odometer for planned routes / uploaded tracks, calories burned by activity, etc

The best thing of all is that the entire front end is powered by flex! You'll experience no more javascript / html page refresh lags or slow ajax calls, everything is as smooth as an application on your desktop, but all via the web!

For you tech people out there, some of the technical aspects of the application are:

  • Data layer is powered by Drupal and Services modules
  • That includes custom services modules capable of handling file uploads via flash
  • Flash 10 and Flex, giving us access to the new FileReference methods so we can post files directly via AMF
  • Using Flex google maps! FAST and extensibile!
  • Utilizing the GPX file format for GPS data

So stand by folks, we should have an "early beta" available soon! We've worked out all the major kinks getting Flex 3.2 / Flash 10 builds going, gmaps interaction, gpx parsing and export, map drawing, Service modules and more! By the way, the logo above isn't the final one, something we're just messing around with to put a face on the application!

Posted by Dan
in

TrailBlaze API

Dan's picture
On November 2nd, 2008 Dan says:

I also wanted to mention that we're also planning on releasing a TrailBlaze API with the release of our application. So developers will be able to tie in to our service and call various methods through RPC methods like XMLRPC and AMF. So developers will be able to extend the platform and use it as a kind of "application engine" for tracks and trails. We'll expose things like login, route addition, track addition, gpx parsing, route distance calculation, marker and note methods, search, etc. So if you don't like OUR interface, you can build your own! Or if we don't have an interface for your platform, you can build one. All you'll need is a platform that supports our remoting APIs (which will start off with AMF and XMLRPC)