In the open-source geospatial ecosystem, routing solutions often rely on standalone compiled binaries. While these tools are typically feature-rich and performant, they can lack the flexibility offered by JavaScript - thanks to its ubiquity to run across browsers, servers, and mobile platforms.

This talk will explore the options when choosing to do routing in the JavaScript ecosystem. It will introduce a new library called Terra Route, which is a lightweight, zero-dependency TypeScript library for routing directly on GeoJSON network data. It will cover the core concepts behind Terra Route, how to integrate it into real-world applications, and how it achieves correctness and speed without external dependencies. It will also compare the performance and feature set of Terra Route with other routing libraries and why you might want to choose those instead in certain scenarios.

There will be a demonstration of using Terra Route for near instantaneous client side multi-stop route drawing in the browser via integration with the open source Terra Draw library. This use case is perfect for applications that require fast, client-side routing without the need for a server or external API calls. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the future of routing in JavaScript and how Terra Route fits into that landscape.