Monday, October 27, 2008

Maps and Polygons and JDBC, oh my.

Today has been an odd day of sorts, but I got a lot done.

First, the big thing... I got the connectivity to the database working and drawing polygons. Now the next big thing is going to be having a poicondai-web page that sorts everything out by counties and tags the resulting polygons with pop-up counts.

Then, the next big thing is going to be implementing modular pop-ups that instead of just showing counts, show a Google-chart for the selected area with a histogram and what-not. But that might get over-ridden with the encoding of zip-codes.

Otherwise, I am in danger of hitting that ambivalence trap. I spent some time sprucing up the old poicondai chart-based application, and then found out it would have been ostensibly better to get the new map application working... but at the same time the sprucing-up I did is going to probably be pulled into the new poicondai-maps application... and there are lots of better ways I could have set up the database pulling, and I might just replace the whole JDBC framework with Hibernate... and there are lots of different things I could do and I seem to be focusing on the most visually nifty and code-based annoying.

Also, I have lots of little doubts. Despite many days of concept proofing I keep worrying about some functionality not being there and throwing me back to the drawing board (what if I cannot assign click handlers to polygons? Stuff like that).

But like most things... I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have... and it's not like the loops and caches I would build aren't going to be useful if I have to move from a polygon-based map to a tile-based map.

So wish me luck... now I am just trying to get things on map attached to the numbers coming back from NPDS.

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