MapQuest Developer Blog

There's an ever-increasing amount of applications using location data. Some are licensing data, some are using open-source data, and some are building datasets from user-generated records. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to match records between them. For instance, latitude and longitude may...

We're loading up all the gear to make our annual trip to Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive. This year will be bigger than ever and I wanted to recap all of our plans and happenings so you can make sure you don't miss a thing. If you're busy printing out your directions and have your sights set...

We just launched an enhanced version of MapQuest Route Planner that includes a new web service, enabling you to integrate Route Planner into your own external websites/applications. If you're unfamiliar with Route Planner, it's a feature that takes a route of up to 26 25 stops and reorders them...

There's a lot of change going on at MapQuest. Our Consumer application has been completely rewritten to reflect ways users are using and sharing location information. You can read more about "Redefining the User Experience" on our sister blog for MapQuest.com and check out this video about the...

Mid-March is almost upon us. For thousands, this time of year means one thing: time to go to Austin, TX for SXSW! MapQuest is no exception. In addition to helping attendees get around Austin and find venues for the Interactive, Film, and Music portions of the conference, we'll have a booth set-up...

Chris Adamson is a developer and author. His most recent application for the iPhone, named "Road Tip," was just released to the App Store. It's a slick app that performs corridor searches of what's in front of you along your route. So that coffee shop that you past a few miles back? It's smart...

Along with today's relaunch of the MapQuest Developer Network, we're also launching two new products to go with it.

MapQuest is happy to announce the launch of a completely rebuilt and revised MapQuest Developer Network. Our goal is to make it easy for the growing development community to get started with the MapQuest Platform and for experienced developers to find what info they need fast.

We've had a lot of excitement this month with multiple launches and cool projects. We wanted to make sure that we also highlight our recently updated JavaScript 6.0 SDK Beta. In the latest build, we've got some great additions to the feature set:

In addition to auditioning for sitcoms at the studios, MapQuest will be at the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles, October 4th-7th. We'll be talking to developers, showing demos of our MapQuest Platform using the current 5.3 AS3 SDK and our upcoming 6.0 SDK (currently in Beta). My colleague Ant...

In recent weeks we've had a string of updates talking about new services and features we've been working on. Today we've got two new Web Services we're releasing into beta and a feature update for the Beta Directions Web Service.

MapQuest is on the road to Austin, Texas - hopefully to speak on panels at SXSW Interactive. Over on our sister blog for MapQuest.com, we've got an overview of the two panels we're stumping for votes:

So we have a bonanza of beta and preview updates to share with you. We've been busy making a number of updates to the MapQuest Platform and we've been creating new Web Services and revising our client-side SDKs.

Today we've released a preview of our upcoming 6.0 version of the MapQuest Platform: JavaScript SDK. This version release is a complete overhaul of the code base and designed to be more modular, more lightweight, and easier-to-use code. We've also simplified our documentation, making it easier to...

Last week we pushed out Optimized Routing to our Directions Web Service beta. The week before that we introduced our new Directions Web Service. Today we're making the Route Matrix feature available.

For our Enterprise Edition users, we've just introduced Premium Data Sets. This allows easy integration of location-based point, boundary, and demographic data into your application.

We recently announced the beta of our new Directions Web Service for the MapQuest Platform; today we want to tell you that the team just added Optimized Routing functionality to the code.

Today we're celebrating "One small step for man..." However, it turns out that it's the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing we're celebrating, not today's beta release of our new Directions Web Service. Well I say: "Why can't we celebrate both?"

Back in October we announced that we would be retiring our old OpenAPI product on Saturday, January 31st. OpenAPI was replaced almost a year ago with our easier-to-use and much more feature-rich MapQuest Platform: Free Edition.

MapQuest will be attending Adobe Max next week in San Francisco. We'll be hanging out with the Adobe community and demonstrating the features and functionality of our AS3 and FUJAX APIs.

At the start of the New Year, MapQuest will be retiring the MapQuest OpenAPI product, having launched the more feature rich MapQuest Platform: Free Edition product. Since the MapQuest OpenAPI does not use the same backend as our newer APIs, nor does it provide the breadth in functionality, we...

So you may be looking at that MapQuest map embedded in your site or one of thousands of other sites who also use the MapQuest Platform and thinking: "Is something different today?"

So you're reading this, which means you either follow our RSS feed, check in on the blog directly, or happened to land here looking for something (which we hope you found BTW). What you might not know is that we have a few other ways to keep tabs on MapQuest news and happenings for both the...

One of the challenges all web developers face is future versions of platforms your application runs on. When a new browser or in this case version 10 of the Adobe Flash Player is on the horizon, it's good to run your application against it to see if any changes will need to be made before the new...

We're big fans of the annual SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Some of us at MapQuest have been attending for years.

AOL Music just launched a great site called Tour Tracker. It allows you to see when and where your favorite bands are playing and shows coming to a town near you.

You can now print MapQuest maps!

With the 5.3 release of the MapQuest Platform, we've now deactivated the beta versions (until the next version is ready for beta of course). If you were using the 5.3 beta versions, here's some quick tips to keep your application running smoothly:

We are pleased to announce the release of version 5.3 of the MapQuest Platform! This update focuses on enhancements to our 3 client-side APIs: JavaScript, AS3, and FUJAX.

As we get closer to the final release of version 5.3 of the MapQuest Platform, we've just added Release Candidate 5 of our JavaScript and FUJAX APIs to the Beta page.

Shazou (Japanese for "mapping") is a great Firefox plug-in developed by Seisan to map and geolocate any web site currently being viewed. It's another helpful tool against phishing scams.

As we get closer to the final 5.3 release, we just rolled-out Release Candidate 4 of our 5.3 JavaScript, AS3, and FUJAX APIs. The major update this time: the addition of more features for adding traffic information into your application. We've also added traffic documentation and code samples for...

Continuing our string of weekly trade show announcements, we'd like to let you know that MapQuest is a Platinum Sponsor of and will be attending the annual Where 2.0 Conference being held next week in Burlingame, CA from May 12th to the 14th. (For those of you not familiar with the Valley, the...

MapQuest will be in attendance at JavaOne being held next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. You can visit us in the Pavilion at booth #1124; a number of the MapQuest Developers will also be running around and attending sessions. Feel free to stop and talk with us.

MapQuest will be out in Santa Clara, CA this week attending the Location Intelligence conference. We have a booth set-up and will be happy to demo and discuss the MapQuest Platform with you.

Developer David Bello has written a great plug-in for AIM called "Share-a-Map." That clever name may have something to do with why we're covering it here.

Earlier this month we told you about a "Great Mashup using APIs from Ribbit, Kayak, and MapQuest" by Andrew Powell, shamelessly plugging it to help him win a Wii.

"Ribbit / MapQuest / Kayak Mashup" is the title of a post by Andrew Powell from Universal Mind, introducing a great hotel search app he built using APIs from (big surprise!) Kayak, Ribbit, and our very own AS3 API.

Alltop is a site that creates category "dashboards" of "all the top" sites on the Internet in both tech and non-tech related categories. They just launched a category for programming information at http://programming.alltop.com. The MapQuest Developer Blog is among the helpful programming...

This morning we released an update to the MapQuest JavaScript API. Version 5.3, Release Candidate 3 contains the following new functionality:

This morning we released an update to our JavaScript API. Version 5.2.1 uses DOJO 1.0.2, which fixes a bug in the original DOJO 0.9.0 GFX library that could cause line overlays to "jump" at certain zoom levels. If you do not use overlays in the 5.2 version of the JavaScript API, you do not need...

We just got back from a great couple of days at SXSW Interactive where we announced our new MapQuest Platform: Free Edition.

Hi! If you're reading this, you've gotten word we have this Developer Blog. A number of thoughts might be running through your mind as you hover over the "next" button on your feed reader or "close" on this browser tab:

Are you a developer who wishes that you could get rid of a server-side proxy page to bypass cross-domain browser issues?

Let's talk briefly about globes. You know, those ones that sit in libraries in period piece movies where some old guy in a leather chair sits next to it, smoking a pipe and calling Shakespeare a hack? Those globes. The ones where when you see them, you can't help but spin it as hard as you can in...

I'm writing about one show while I'm attending another. I'm in the beautiful city of Miami at the Future of Web Apps conference. As this show is winding down from a great day of learning, meeting, networking and demoing, people are already talking about next big migration of developers and...

Fine, we admit it. The MapQuest platform does not officially support the LOLcode syntax. As you can see, this has caused some disappointment within the LOLcode programming community. It's not like we didn't take a shot at it. Below is early draft of some sample code one of our developers we call ...

We are quite serious about being on a mission to providing great tools, resources, code, and the information you need to make using the MapQuest Platform easy and useful. From newbie to seasoned code jockey, we want to make sure we've got you covered.

Welcome to the MapQuest Developer Network Blog!