yahoo maps

Well. i've nearly finished writing the basic functionality that will allow me to switch between using the google or yahoo maps api. this would have given me real flexibilty in terms of outages to either service, or api changes. however whilst testing the yahoo code i've come to the realisation that actually, yahoo maps doesn't cover the uk. oh bugger.

its not all bad though. rejigging the code to aloow for both apis has forced me to refactor some stuff
which i probably would have left. and it now means i can concentrate on sorting the google functionality safe in the knoweldge that if/when yahoo decide to open up maps to the uk i'll be able to take advantage of it.

When implementing the yahoo maps api i decided to go down the ajax route and wrote a getoverlay page that returned a valid georss document. There is no reason why i can't code the google ajax code to simply read the same file (code reuse, oh yes). so that is the next step really.

once that is done, i'll need to think about images for the icons. and i'll also need to rewrite the overlay code so that i can pass the price range parameters in the ajax call. This also means i need to create a ddl of house prices, then work out the javascript code (really easy probably but i'm shite at javascript) that can get the selected value from the ddl and the place name from the textbox.

whats new

made some progress on adding properties to the database

read a article about the new beta of yaho maps. got me thinking that maybe i should try and build the "mapmove" (don't like the name but its shorter than, "google maps rightmove competitor idea") site so that it will work with either yahoo or googles api. I guess this is the sort decision that needs to be made when you use thrid party web services. its all very well developing an app to use a service, but you are then completely dependent upon the unguarranteed service working.

Writing the site so that i can switch between the two (maybe just a flag in the web.config) would be really useful, espeically i either api changes radically or stops.

I'll have to read this stuff:
http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/

longitude and latitude fun

when i first set wrote the screenscrape i chucked up a database for it to write to with the lat and lng being saved as varchar s. obviously this is shite so i started looking at the corrcet data type to store them as.

Eventually after much pain and fannying around with floats (bad idea leave them alone) i have a latitude and longitude field in my database with the following data type

Decimal(9) with a scale of 6 and a precision of 18 (the default).

maps maps maps

making slow but steady progress on the mapmove (as i've badly named it) idea. noconsultant now being completely sidelined.

i've been working on the basic adding a property functionality. to be used by agents. they enter property details (price, postcode, etc) that gets saved to a table, and then kicks off the screenscraper to get the lng and lat values for the postcode whcih are then added to the proprty table.

Also been reading up on using ajax with the maps api. originally i was thinking i'd have to dynamically generate loads of javascript to create the overlays for the properties on the map. but instead i'll asyncronously call a .aspx from the javascript which will return an xml document containing the properties and their coordinates.

google maps etc

i've been continuing poc on the idea to use google maps to plot houses for sale. not an original idea it turns out as theres a ssimilar thing done in the us with craigslist.

obstacles so far have been post office being nazi's and owning the copyright to postcodes. but i've written a really simple screenscraper that scrapes google maps to get the latitude and longitude values. postcodes are important not for the user but for estate agents to be able to add a property.
i expect users to just search by place names.

so far i've got this:
1) screenscraper
2) list of uk towns and cities and their lat and long values
3) thought about how the ui would work
4) created a basic generic da class