Com2Kid's Journal: AJAXian Canvas, Python, and Web 2.0 goodness

Ever had to find your way around a huge college campus? How about ever been late for a class or meeting on a regular?

AJAX to the rescue!

WWU Route Finder is a proof of concept of an AJAX map using Canvas and Python. Click two buildings, and the Python back end, accessed using XMLHTTPRequest of course, shows you the shortest path between your start and destination.

The biggest advantage is that the Python back end can access a highly optimized Graphing library and potentially support real time processing of hundreds of thousands of nodes, taking advantage of the server hardware and not relying upon the performance of a browser's Javascript engine.

Now THAT is cool!

[Scott Lockwood]

Did you write that? That's seriously spiffy! I want something like that for getting to work from the train station. Now I just need a real time data feed of what's busy between here and there.

Re:

[Com2Kid]

Did you write that?

Indeed, I did. Freshman/Sophmore algorithms, but excellent use of them. :)

I want something like that for getting to work from the train station.

My county kinda-sorta-almost has something like it set up. Dealing with directed graphs and dynamic weights instead, path finding across a city is a fair bit harder, but King County here in WA state has "common point to point" times that are calculated in semi-real time. (i.e. updated every x minutes).

safari

[nocomment]

works great in firefox. A minor bug in Safari though. If you click a point outside of a building you don't get the spiffy error that you need to click inside a building.

Re:

[Com2Kid]

Yah, I found that out today when I stopped by my school bookstore and used their Mac.

I have no clue why, it is just a simple alert() call. ^_^

Actually, scrolling the page is broken in every browse except Firefox. Why? Well every browser[1] implements getting the mouse coordinates from a click event differently, and FF is the one I happen to have. I also have the IE code in there, but IE doesn't support canvas. Google has exCanvas I can use if I want IE canvas tag support, but I did not have time yester