Data61 Capstone Project 2016

This is a Web application that enables the user to choose a route. See the full description in the wiki: https://github.com/xordspar0/Data61-capstone-2016/wiki

Extensibility

The application was designed with extensibility in mind. There are a few ways someone might want to extend the application, and we have done our best to support this.

Currently, our application only has one external data source: Flickr. Ideally, there should be others, such as Yelp and Foursquare. More data sources can be added as functions in dataSources.js. New functions added there have two responsibilities: 1) they should add features that need to go on the map using the routeKMLExporter object, and 2) when all of the features have been added, they should call updateMap(), which loads the new map into the Google map and updates the download link.

The application is also designed to be able to support more route evaluation criteria. Currently, we only evaluate routes based on distance, because this is the only data we have about routes. To add criteria such as time or number of popular attractions, a numerical evaluation of this data should be passed in an array to RankArrayByIndex() in gAPI.js. More styles would also need to be made in KMLExporter.js to visualize the criteria differently.

Issues

There are some issues to be aware of when working on this application.

1. To load a KML file into the Google map, you need to host the KML file on a publicly accessible server, and it needs to end in ".kml".

2. Currently, we host our KML files on a pastebin service so that they are accessible to Google. If we had known about the restrictions of Google Maps earlier, we probably would have simply written some server-side code to generate KML files and return a publically accessible URL. For the web application to work properly in its current state, the kmlFileGenerator.py script has to be hosted on a server. app.js/updateMap() must point to this script.

3. Google Maps does not have complete support of KML. It disregards some style information when loading KML files. You can load the same KML files in Google Earth or National Map and the styles will work fine.

4. Our code for retrieving the latitude and longitude of pictures from Flickr makes synchronous calls to the Flickr API. This is very slow. For a couple hundred photos, it takes several minutes. During this time, the application is unresponsive. This really should be done asynchronously and in parallel, but we didn't have time to work that out.