WhirlyViz 1.3 - Javascript Update

WhirlyViz is a geospatial visualization engine for mobile devices.  It's based on my WhirlyGlobe-Maply open source library.  With it, you can whip together a pretty data visualization for an iPad or iPhone.

I license the engine to clients, but the WhirlyViz app is free and the best demonstration of the engine itself.

Javascript

WhirlyViz is eminently configurable.  That's kind of the point, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with what we had in 1.2.  Now I know why.  With version 1.3 we've switched to Javascript.

Apple added support for JavaScriptCore in ios7.  They put together a fairly nice bridge between Objective-C and Javascript to go with it.  This gives you a clean, empty Javascript interpreter to use in your app.

That's just what I did.  WhirlyViz configuration files are now Javascript.  Whenever a user taps on something, or a remote vector tile needs to be loaded, or even when the visualization starts up you're running a Javascript function.

This example talks to a WMS server.

It's incredibly flexible and as long as it's not in the main rendering loop (good grief no!) still very fast.  There are other advantages too.

Everything Speaks JSON

These days every remote web service speaks JSON.  [Except for the ones that don't].  Using Javascript makes it much easier to decode a random JSON return value and do something visual with it.

SF Bay Area Bike Share

For example, several public bike share companies provide JSON feeds with up-to-the-minute station availability.  They have spatial data, but not as GeoJSON.  That's kind of annoying, but now easily fixed.

• We fetch the appropriate feed in the script
• Parse the JSON return and iterate through the records
• Pull out location data and anything we might want to display
• Convert the data to GeoJSON and hand it back to WhirlyViz

WhirlyViz still knows nothing about the JSON feeds from the bike share companies, it's just displaying GeoJSON with some styling info.  The script has all the smarts and, best of all, it wasn't all that much code.

Running Your Own Script

WhirlyViz has its own URL scheme for displaying data.  Refer back to this post for details.

Now you can run your own Javascript configuration file too.  Just specify it like so.

The script argument tells WhirlyViz we're running a script and the js argument tells it where to go get it.  Of course, then you have to write one of these and the documentation is... lacking.

Wrapup

You can see some of the new examples in the latest WhirlyViz update.  I'm now talking to two new geospatial data services which will get their own blog posts.

I'm very happy with this approach and I'll be writing up the Javascript functions shortly.  You can kind of figure it out from the examples, but documentation is important.

In the mean time, if you have a neat visualization you'd like to see on mobile, hit me up and we'll talk.