This thesis describes the work accomplished during the internship integrated in the Master in Informatics Engineering of the Science and Technology Faculty of the University of Coimbra. The described content is focused on the study and development of a web application, including the description of processes, methodologies and produced results. These elements will help to understand the characteristics of the project and how it will improve the student’s academic education.

The purpose of this project was developing a social platform, which integrated with the YouTrace engine to produce a World map from the traces submitted in the application. The social aspects of the application were also in focus during the development of the application and a significant part of this thesis is related to them.

The work described in this thesis can be divided into four areas of interest: analysis, development, usability and optimizations.

The analysis area included all the research performed for this project. This study was mostly done in the first semester and focused the study of collaborative mapping, social network, web development frameworks and, recently, web mapping application. The analysis on each one of these topics was very important to the following development phase.

The development of the social platform was the task where we spent most of the time of this project. It goes from the planning phase to the implementation of the API and explains in detail all the different components of the application.

Usability was always a big concern during this project and we dedicated a lot of our attention to it. Besides the wireframes inspection and the formal usability analysis, we also focused on the user experience improvements.

Finally, we reserved some time to work on possible optimizations for the application. This included a complete analysis, front-end optimizations and server performance tweaks, with particular emphasis on the caching features.