MapQuest Offers “a sane and modern web service” for Directions

It’s called the Directions Web Service and it’s supposed to be easy to use.

As I understand it, you include a simple call and can get back “a JSONP response containing the directions narrative data and then fires the defined JavaScript callback function in your app. You then have the flexibility to display the information in your UI however you want.”

There’s some nice features:

- you can submit the request in several formats and get it back in a different one
- queries can be quite complex
- the service can help eliminate ambiguous addresses (or not)
- response can come verbose or in performance encoded form for enhanced speed and small size
- more to come

There’s no cost for the service, but you do need a free developer license key.

- MapQuest Dev Blog
- Docs