Conference Paper

Mapboo is a SaaS to publish maps on mobile devices. Anybody can publish in the main app stores a mobile map app with their own data without writing a line of code.
The Mapboo user could create mobile app in a few minutes without having to worry about problems like:
Hardware and software fragmentation
Different programming languages
The performance in different platforms

Mapboo is based in Glob3 Mobile (Mobile Map tools. https://github.com/glob3mobile/g3m) that provides the visualization library for the editor and a set of apps (G3M is a multi platform map component).
These apps (generic) have been developed to generate automatically retrieving the configuration data from the mapboo service.

Mapboo updates the info of its apps in real-time. To do that we have developed a real-time server using WebSockets (using Netty). (For environments where websockets are not working the system automatically switches to a long polling system). Every change in the model is instantly broadcasted to all apps connected. The app administrator can change several things like data sources, description, app background color, etc…
Mapboo has support for:
iOS
Android
html5 - webGL
There are applications for:
publishing (Generic apps fed by service)
testing (App used for administrators to see the final look&feed of their app)
building (A web-gl dashboard to edit apps)

The app will be deployed using AWS and the database to store the app configuration and all the service data will be MongoDB.
The web editor uses jquery and the server app is working in a Jetty Server.
MapBoo is highly scalable and is currently in beta version. Mapboo will be fully operational before summer of 2014.

In this moment we are developing new and exciting features like the support for user’s vectorial data. To do that, the data sets are transformed with GDAL to g3m friendly optimized formats and stored to be used for the mapboo apps.
The vectorial rendering allow the users, for example, to change the data symbolization in real time.