"Beer. Now there's a temporary solution." -- Homer Simpson

Monkey Map

Monkey Map is a mobile map service, which myself and seven of my colleagues developed for our group project. It provides users with a facility for getting directions to go somewhere via the shortest route, in the form of text instructions, and a map of the route. This can be accessed either through a web interface (using a Java applet), or on a mobile phone (using WAP). These services can be found at:

Features

  • HTTP interface to server, running as a Java Servlet on Apache Tomcat
  • Efficient route finding, using the A-Star algorithm
  • Clear and informative text instructions
  • Facility to route to a category of locations, such as 'places to eat'
  • Dynamic generation of WML pages
  • Dynamic SVG rendering of map images using Apache Batik
  • Clickable map, for location selection
  • Instruction highlighting on map
  • Facility to search for a location, allowing regular expression searches
  • XML data format for map data
  • Multiple language support (currently English, French and German)

My Involvement

I was in charge of the back-end of the server, from the design of the server classes and the specification of the XML data format, through to the implementation of the XML parser, server data structures, and router. I also did a large amount of work on system integration and testing later on in the project, pulling together code that other people had written to get the system working. I also gave the presentation at the end of the project.

You can access some of the documents that I produced here. I may add some code excerpts at a later date: