CIS 8020 Assignment 2 David Bowles Google Maps API

If you are a transportation company, you need a way to track the goods you have in route to your customers or possibly goods traveling back to your premises in the case of reverse logistics.

The following case outlines a partial solution for tracking those items in an effective way using the Google Maps API, JavaScript, and PHP.

Most companies offering satellite tracking of tractors only provide the customer with latitude/longitude coordinates and the customer must decide what to do with the data to interpret it in a meaningful manner. In my company's case, we are using an antiquated software packaged called Street Atlas which the users must browse and find the appropriate "tracking" file. The solution I have toyed with to provide a cleaner, more-seamless integration would allow the satellite vendor to write data directly into a mySQL database (if they have the capability) or directly to a JSON text file and have a JavaScript program within the site read the data and display it onto a Google map. The other "administrative" benefit is the user no longer needs to have Street Atlas installed on their computer which also eliminates licensing fees since Google Maps is free.

This view allows for two ways to track tractors:

1. By clicking a point on the map to determine which tractor it is, or
2. By clicking a tractor number on the right side of the map and the related point highlights.

Below is a screenshot of this prototype application. By clicking on the picture, you will be taken to the site that actually hosts it. I have had to host the application on my personal website because the limitations of Blogspot does not allow me to host files that contains the data used to populate the map.

The other closest Google APIs that you could use to develop such an application would be either the Google Analytics or Google Charts APIs. Both APIs have the same difficulty in that they do not have integrated "geo-coding" mechanisms to pass the API a latitude/longitude pair and it visualize a point on the map. Both of these APIs can only illustrate political or physical boundaries. Google Maps API is the only choice for accurately representing location data onto a map-like visualization.

If anyone would like a copy of the code that I used to develop this application, please let me know and I will be happy to supply it.

Update: I noticed today that the graphics are "hokey" in Internet Explorer. This application is best viewed in a browser like Firefox or Safari.

David Bowles