2010

HTML Div’s layered onto Google Streetview: Chrome issue

16th December, 2010 - Posted by david

While working on Daft‘s Map Search facility, we naturally decided to integrate Google’s Street View (SV) as a feature, especially since we were one of the launch partners for the product in Ireland. We decided to do this as follows:

For each property icon on the map, when you click on it, bring up a small info window with a picture, minimal details, a link to the property’s main page and, where applicable a link to the SV image for that property
When clicking on the SV link, the entire map is replaced with the SV window
A button would then exist to close the SV window and revert back to the map

Web programming with Python and web.py: my experience

2nd November, 2010 - Posted by david

Quick Introduction

I’ve written the front page and an ajax handler for a web application using Python and web.py. Here I give my thoughts on using a niche product (web.py) and some of the coding issues I had to figure out on my own, in case some one has similar problems.

Google Maps API V3 Overview Control

9th October, 2010 - Posted by david

In mid-2009, Google launched version 3 of their fantastic Google Maps API. This new version was a complete overhaul of the existing system, moving to an MVC-based architecture, with the primary focus on speeding up the code so it would work better on mobile devices. It has now taken over from Maps API v2 as their primary Maps AP v2 now deprecated.

One of the things missing from v3 that was in v2 was v2’s GOverviewControl, which was the mini-map you’d see on the bottom right of the main map, which would be zoomed out further than the main map. When I started work on overhauling Daft.ie’s mapping system, we originally used Maps v2 and had such a control in place. We decided to use Maps v3 for the new system and it was then I noticed that the Overview Control was missing. At the time I was still learning how to use the API and have since become reasonably proficient in it, enough so to complete our maps overhaul! Taking these skills, I’ve now written a jQuery-based JavaScript extension that enables users to add the Overview Control to their map, along with a number of customisation options.

Inconsistent JSON arrays using PHP’s json_encode

14th September, 2010 - Posted by david

I’d be amazed if anyone ever has come across this problem before, but it’s one that stumped me recently and I feel would make a good first ‘real’ post for this new blog.

Firstly, a bit of background: in work, we have an API that uses the XML-based SOAP protocol over HTTP. You can request data either using a PHP SOAP plug-in, or by passing your parameters as encoded JSON over a HTTPS connection. The data you get back is usually an array of properties, with various fields set. When data is requested in JSON, it’s returned in JSON. On the main server, we use memcached, which gets checked for a given query before we hit the main database. Whenever a query is made to the API, if there’s nothing in the cache, we hit the database and then cache the result for 5 minutes, to reduce the impact on our primary database; pretty standard stuff for a big website.

First Post

3rd September, 2010 - Posted by david

I work as a web developer for daft.ie, Ireland’s largest and busiest website and have been there since August 2008. In my 2+ years of professional web development, I’ve come across many tips and tricks, which I’d like to share with anyone who’s interested. Alot of them have come from serious browsing for solutions on Google, Stackoverflow and the like, while some I’ve come up with myself. My main aim here is to share my knowledge by providing (hopefully) simple guides for people with similar problems, to save them the hassle I went through originally!