Development thoughts (R 0.1)

A weekend project is turning out to be more ambitious from the looks of it.  Yes this is YAMS (Yet Another Mapping Site).  The list will tell that this requires more than one person tapping away on the keyboard.

Icing on the cake

1) multi-tab infowindows

- Ours (our photos)

- Flickr (photos from Flickr from the same geo location)

- Location info

- Location news feed from Google

2) Create some savvy markers instead of using the usual.

3) Provide easier navigation by incorporating a location drop-down list.  Must Ajaxify the experience.

4) Slideshow overlay (anywhere possible ????  will have to see what is lurking out there)

5) Panning like FlickrVision

6) Friend on-line (MSN Messenger API)

7) Adding new marker - auto geo code

8) Visitor marker - using IP to find location (possibly on a different smaller scale map. Not on the same map because the no. of markers will slow the rendering of the overlay).

Server side provisions

1) Management tool to build similar photo mapping pages for registered users

2) Photo upload

3) XML implementation

Choice of development tools

My first choice is to use .NET using C sharp as the coding language but this is not possible until the GMAP2 wrapper control is released.

My other choice is to use Rails.  This gives me the flexibility to develop in either OSX or Windows.  This would require learning Rails.  It is good that resource is available.

Least favoured choice is to do all coding in JavaScript.  Maintenance and scalability may be challenging.  We would have a heavy client.  I would rather let the server generate the client script.

Hosting

I can only decide on hosting plans after I decide what I will be using to develop this in.