A build Point

I have reached a point where I was able to hand the code for gmap-polygon to Felicia so she could use it to draw polygons for data that her services were returning. Many thanks to Felicia and Brian. Felicia for her patience for all the "oh crap, that's not doing what I thought, sync and try again" moments. Brian for doing some textedit niftiness to turn the KML files into easier to parse flat-files.

Otherwise, I am going to be off on vacation for the next couple of days, and some of them Felicia will still be coding, so I am glad I got a chance to explain the inner workings of the code and that I spent a lot of time trying to make it as agnostic as possible.

Otherwise, that being said, I really need to step up my Javadoc documentation. I'm committing to spending the last hour of each day documenting all my new stuff (and old stuff I forgot to document) and checking it in. That way, people who AREN'T sitting right next to me will have a much easier time figuring out how to do stuff and why I did the things I did the way I did them.

Cheers, and Happy Holidays.

Thank goodness for other coders

So, I have this nasty tendency to get into ruts... and sort of formulate something in my mind and consider it the only really good way to do something because it's formed.

Luckily, I also have this tendency to occasionally ask other people which parts seem like good ideas, and which parts would annoy the snot out of them if they ever came across my code or had to use it.

After getting a prototype of the polygon generator and drawer setup working, I asked Felicia to help me with a bit of a 'does the way I'm doing this seem painful to you' type review, and in discussion both she and Brian helped me piece everything together... including a few extra concepts:

1. Forcing people to write a class all the time rather than just be able to set a few fields with the values they want really sucks. It's kind of a lazy way of implementing something flexible. One can always just make an interface to keep things flexible. If someone wants to do something so radical and complicated they just have to write their own class, then it makes it easy, but it sucks to not just build a default with an easy way to change the most obvious option.

2. JSPs shouldn't have much java code in them. At all. They should invoke the class up top, and then call the method in the right spot where the variable comes in. JSPs should be more about the layout and less about the code. The code should go *ding* up in that class you substantiated up top.

Thus, for tomorrow, I am hoping to complete the color handler (with easily settable shading colors), write and create the popup handler (with easily handle-able sort of string placement options) and then write an example JSP that makes it easy to show how to invoke the class and use a minimum of java in a simple init function.

I'm sure this isn't the first iteration, and a lot of stuff might change later.

But, I think it will be better than it was.