ALK Technologies has announced the availability of PC*Miler Web Services 26. Among the new options available is the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), a Microsoft.NET framework that simplifies the process of building and maintaining service-oriented web applications.
WCF implements modern industry standards for interoperability of web services and provides a unified programming model for service-oriented applications that communicate across the web and the enterprise, ALK said. An ASMX service option is also available.
“This hosted solution enables transportation and logistics companies, as well as developers, to rapidly deploy applications using PC*Miler 26 routing, mileage and mapping,” said Michael Kornhauser, senior vice president, enterprise solutions at ALK Technologies. “We have seen a significant trend among partners and customers to access our industry standard capabilities through this powerful, cost effective SaaS solution. This trend is highlighted by the largest Internet load boards upgrading to PC*Miler Web Services.”
According to ALK, PC*Miler capabilities are exposed as a standard web service developed in a .NET XML interface with an ASMX-SOAP, WCF-SOAP and WCF-REST service options that can be used by a multitude of desktop, mobile or web-based applications running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks, over the Internet.
The Premium service provides more accurate transit times and ETAs through real-time predictive and historical traffic speed data features. These features provide a predictive calculation of route-specific time of day and time of week-based transit times to improve load planning and hours-of-service compliance, the company pointed out. Users can see real-time traffic maps as well as access traffic forecasts for more than 1 million miles of roads across the United States and Canada.
Users can also generate routes and toll costs based on the time of day for heavy-duty trucks, light vehicles and automobiles and create geofences. When a route crosses a customer-specific map geofence, PC*Miler Web Services either displays a warning in the route itinerary or avoids the geofenced area altogether, depending on user preferences.
