January 22, 2003

geoTracker 1.0 goes live!

So this is what I've been up to for the last month. Escaping the office at 5 and working on this project until morning has never been more fun. Ok, so what is geoTracker? geoTracker is an application that provides a visitor-based snapshot of the global weather in near-real time. Each user will contribute to generate this partial view by accessing the available weather stations worldwide. Most importantly, each user will be able to view in real time where are the other users accessing this application coming from geographically, and which station's weather information are they accessing. geoTracker combines a light local database with several web-services and APIs from which it pulls data to resolve the user's geographical location and bring in the weather reports for each location. All data requests will get distributed to all connected clients through a persistent connection made to the server. launch geoTracker learn more about it It is my first try with hands on ColdFusion, Remoting and MySQL, and let me tell you something; it was super simple!. Everything integrated so nicelly I had all the backend code up and running in a couple of days, and I was able to fully concentrate in the frontend code the rest of the time. FlashCom was also very sweet - although I did have some trouble in the beggining - when I started working on it, I realized the hard way that buidling something for a single user, is completely different than building it for several users at a time. The application logic turns to be completelly different, and it gets way much more complicated than expected sometimes. Anyways, hope you enjoy it. Any questions or feedback are mostly welcome.