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The GraphHopper Routing Engine Turns 5 Years Today

Today is a special day: the 5th birthday of our routing engine. See here the first commits after it was started on a sunny Sunday. It is funny to skim over this, we not even owned the graphhopper.com domain at this time. Also the engine had a lucene and neo4j storage option. Read here the very first blog entry about the engine. Since then, we have had 8 releases. Another one will follow soonish with many interesting new features (see images below).

After several months of toying around with it, it was clear for us that we need to make money out of our open source software to make this work sustainable. The GraphHopper routing engine, and of course especially jsprit, a vehicle routing toolkit, all contribute to our success.

Together we’ve achieved not only a production grade routing engine but also a flourishing business, a growing team, lots of open source software (recently, we published a new timezone API), and a growing and busy community. You can participate very easily: join our forum, improve the documentation, or contribute a change to our open source software.

To end this post, we’ve collected a few images from the past and also from the future. And as a bonus, kurviger.de is releasing its Android app today.

First routes in the debug UI we were using back then. Rendering of over 5 million roads took only about 40 seconds on an old laptop.

 

GraphHopper Maps was already included from version 0.1

 

GraphHopper Maps screenshot from version 0.3

 

GraphHopper Maps screenshot from version 0.6

 

A sketch from an upcoming blog post explaining the new hybrid mode.

 

A screenshot from an upcoming blog post about the new public transport routing.