Friday, November 9, 2007

Using Zoho Creator ,Yahoo Pipes,and Google maps to Build cool mashups.

Intro:

Integrating Data (overlaying as developer's call it ) onto maps (Google, yahoo) has become a fad these days, the applications range from trivial to Interesting.

By opening up their Mapping platforms Google and Yahoo, have given Interesting framework on which developers can build their applications.

In the same manner, Zoho creator offers end users a brand new way to perform basic CRUD operations using the web both as a database and for processing data.

Here I will briefly describe how I used Google Maps to Integrate with Zoho Creator,Using simple transformations with Yahoo pipes.

The application and its uses:

This Integration i.e Creator +Maps can be used in many ways

for eg:
Tracking Inventory, tracking Human resources, Basic Travel maps or even geographic maps of movie theatres where a current movie is playing.

This application overlays Zoho creator data onto a Google Map i.e in this case Movie Theatres where a particular movie is playing shown on a Google map.

Zoho creator is used to update movie info using the UI or even Bulk upload and Google maps is used to overlay the data.

I also used the cool technology of Yahoo Pipes to basically transform the Feed generated by Zoho Creator.

Well let me just cut the nonsense and jump into nitty gritties…….

How I Built it.

ZOHO Creator:

Build a simple data entry application as shown i.e. which takes the theatre Name, Description and most importantly, a field called Latitude Longitude (point)









Allow the user to punch in the data, usually a movie fan or theatre owner using the ZOHO creator app UI, or even bulk upload an excel sheet ……





Copy the RSS feed generated, go to Yahoo pipes



Yahoo pipes:

Yahoo pipes gives users a very simple interface to transform RSS feeds here, simply add the feed generated by zoho creator and add the location extract module.

So that The RSS generated is GEO compatible i.e GEO RSS.

Please use the rename module to rename point as "georss:point"

Feel free to access the pipe :

http://pipes.yahoo.com/jynn/osorss


You can see the GEO RSS specific data added to the feed in the debugger


Get the RSS feed from yahoo pipes



Generate a tinyurl using services like Tiny.cc for this RSS feed



Google Maps:

Use this RSS feed as an Overlay for a google map i.e q= <>,or simply type the url as shown below

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://tinyurl.com/23yrcc

Here is the result



Larger Map

Enhancements that can be made:

Google’s Mashup editor or even Maps API (JavaScript) offer endless possibilities for further enhancing these Applications……….


PS: I honestly do not know whether ,any movie is playing in these theater's,Just a sample :)



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