HERE Developer Offerings for the Non-Developer

HERE has an incredibly powerful set of tools for developers, but what if you’re not a developer, or just not very familiar with developer terms? Well, with you in mind, we’re presenting an overview of our developer offerings, specifically written for non-developers.

How It's Done

Nearly all (with some notable exceptions we'll cover below) of our services are API based. API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for one computer to speak to another. You can think of it as a computer saying, "I offer information about the weather, you simply need to tell me your zip code." A developer reads that and then knows how to write code to send a zip code to the other computer. This is all done via network calls so that that one side doesn't need to know how the other side is built. This means if your company is a Java shop, Python, .Net, or any other language, it simply won't matter.

When your developer's code makes the request, the computer responds in such a way that the data can be consumed on your platform. The end result is your environment becoming stronger, as it utilizes the power of HERE technology.

What Can Be Done

We'll link to a full list of our services towards the end of this article, but in broad strokes, our APIs cover:

• Geocoding - the process of turning an address into a precise latitude and longitude. You can also reverse this by asking what's at a precise location.
• Search - given a location, what can be found near by? Our search services have incredibly deep layers of filtering. For example, you can search for Asian food, or maybe you want Chinese food specifically, or actually what you want is Jiangsu cuisine.
• Routing - essentially how to go from one place to another, but our routing services can support many different types of routing, perhaps even some you've never heard of. We recently covered this on our developer blog.
• Fleet Telematics - services related to companies that need to manage multiple vehicles.
• Live Sense - support for enabling real time detection of obstacles. Useful for automated vehicles.
• Tour Planning - helps find the best routes for fleets of vehicles doing deliveries with unique constraints.
• Traffic - reports on current data conditions and can estimate future conditions based on past data
• Weather - important information for routing - will it be raining when you get there?

That's a broad look at our APIs, but there's other aspects to our offerings as well.

Powerful Web-based Mapping

We refer to this as our JavaScript Maps product, but you can think of it as maps for the web. Our beautiful maps have multiple styling options as well as full support for customization. Want to render your locations on a map? You can do that. Want to render a route for the user from their location to the closest store? Also possible. And these are just a few of the options available.

Our maps product works in all browsers and supports every possible user interaction. We even support non-interactive maps. They can be featured as simple images that can be used in emails or display-enabled voice assistants. All of this is backed by yet another API that gives you access to particular map tile information for complete customization.

Powerful Web-based Map Building

Sticking with a theme that’s closely connected to the last section of this post, we’d also like to discuss HERE Studio. HERE Studio lets developers and non-developers alike use a simple web interface to build interactive maps that can be shared with others. If you've got existing data and need to quickly render it on a map, HERE Studio makes it as simple as you can imagine.

Once you've designed your map, you can then share a link to it or get the embed code for use on your web site. HERE Studio has a powerful free tier with some nice options at the paid level.

Data Storage (More exciting than it sounds!)

As we said above, HERE Studio lets you upload data to create beautiful interactive maps. Where does that data go? Data Hub is our geospatial cloud database solution. There are plenty of places to store data online, but what makes Data Hub especially attractive is its fine-tuned geospatial APIs. So along with just simple "storage" of your data you also have the ability find out, "which features are close to this location" or "If I go on a route from A to B, which of my features will be nearby?" Basically, imagine a database built for the world of mapping.

Mobile Support

To compliment the APIs and products we've shared above, we also have great support for both iOS and Android. Our mobile SDKs make it easy to add integration into your native mobile applications and there are multiple versions of every SDK, each meeting different needs.

(Please note: we recently added Flutter support as well!)

Additional Options (and where to go next...)

So there we have it! This post covered some of the high level items available to developers but there's even more of course. For example, HERE is supported on AWS, Azure, MuleSoft, and and SAP. These integrations help simplify the process of working with HERE and if you are already on those platforms, your developers will have an easier time adding support for location related applications.

To learn more (or if you simply want your developer to get started right away), head over to https://developer.here.com and sign up for a free account today!