Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 12:46:52 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [11] | 
Categories: SQL 2008 | Virtual Earth

Spent the last day or so cooking up a quick demo for our marketing guys. You can check it out here: http://65.101.234.201/mac/ 

It's pretty basic - it shows GPS points and photos from our mobile asset collection vehicle.

The demo is a small data set, but the points are in SQL 2008. They are clustered on the fly, and sent to the browser. As we add more data into this, I suspect that we will render a roads layer as tiles, and then add click handlers to the map which will allow a user to select a road segment, which will then go and get the points. We may also look at thinning out the points a bit more - partially so there is less data send to the browser, and partly because few users need to see every single photo.

The popup shows the two camera views as small thumbnails, with Next/Prev buttons to view... drum roll... the next/previous photos.

ve-mac1

If you click on a photo in the pop-up it will display a larger set of images in a YUI panel. Again with the next/prev.

ve-mac2

In the other SQL 2008 stuff I've done, I used stored procs to get the data, but this time I opted for dynamic sql, and it works quite nicely - also will make it easier to add more data into the mix (no need for additional sprocs)

I've been working with Dojo on another project, and I must say that the Yahoo User Interface library (aka YUI)  is refreshingly simple - if you don't need a whole ton of stuff, definitely look at YUI before resorting to Dojo or ExtJs.

Right now this site is clearly really limited but that's the nature of "demos". I'll be adding more functionality to this site (additional data sets etc), and if anything interesting comes up I'll post about it.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 7:49:03 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Very nice! I share your sentiments about YUI versus Dojo. Dojo is just brutal to learn. I tend to stick with jQuery as much as possible, but the "off the shelf" YUI components are more advanced.
Tim Maddle
Thursday, March 13, 2008 7:14:21 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Am I the only one who doesn't see any GPS points? Could be because I'm still using IE6?
Thursday, March 13, 2008 7:35:03 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Ben,
IE6 appears to be the problem. I see the points in IE7 and FF2, but not IE6.
Tim Maddle
Thursday, March 13, 2008 3:35:13 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
How are you guys managing an IE6 test system? VMs? Old PC?

IE6 is not an issue for this site since it's a demo, but it would be good to test none the less...
Thursday, March 13, 2008 5:41:25 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
90% of the people in my organization still use IE6 exclusively. I was doing the same until I finally installed "IE7 standalone" a few weeks ago. FF2 is my primary browser, but I can open an instance of IE6 or IE7 easily enough. I know that there are some limitations to IE7 in this scenario, but I'm not sure what they are.
Tim Maddle
Friday, March 14, 2008 8:35:31 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Test system? Ha. The IT manager here is still refusing to let us upgrade our workstations to use IE7. Firefox or any other alternate browswer is also forbidden for some reason. Really I'm lucky to be using a keyboard instead of punchcards.
Friday, March 14, 2008 7:35:16 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Microsoft gives out free VPCs for IE6 and IE7 testing
IE6 VPC
M@
Friday, March 14, 2008 7:41:00 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Oops, looks like they added one for IE8 in there as well.
M@
Saturday, March 15, 2008 6:11:33 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Thanks for the VPC links Matt!

Dave
Monday, March 17, 2008 1:30:53 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
It is swicked
Alex
Monday, March 31, 2008 1:09:04 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)
Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to,doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.
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