Version v0.6.0 of IsoMap has just been released.
This version contains plenty of improvements, but the most important one is the changed computation algorithms for isochrones. “MineRX” is now so stable and well tested that this change makes sense because of it’s superior performance.

For the calculation of the visual coverage of an isochrone the method used has also been changed. This step was done within the spatial database until now, but with the new version v0.6.0 (and onwards) this is done using JTS directly in Java. Therefore it is not necessary to write the isochrone result back to the database anymore which should result in better performance. However, there can be exceptions to this improvement, especially before the JVM performed any optimizations (e.g. when calculating the first isochrone).

In the backend of the application some improvements have been made as well. Besides the availability of some more datasets (Washington, D.C. is now enabled for isochrone calculation) all datasets have been updated. It is now possible to calculate isochrones for every area in the year 2016.
There will be more improvements regarding datasets in the near future, but for now all that I promise is that there will be more regions enabled for isochrone calculations.
Besides the datasets  also the components in the backend have been updated. PostgreSQL is used in verison 9.5.1, PostGIS in version 2.2 and Java in Version 1.8.0u74 while apache tomcat was updated to version 8.0.32.

The frontend does not contain many visible changes. However, due to a loading problem (which especially occurred on recent versions of Mozilla Firefox) the javascript framework was changed from requirejs to webpack. This change leads to better site loading times for all browsers. Also the favorites plugin has been revisited. Besides some changed default values of some settings, this is all there has been done in the frontend.

In case of any feedback,  comments and/or questions, the contact form – as always – can be used.