Re: First web app, ever, so please bear with me

This is my kind of gear... You've hit my nail, right ontop of my head... I have made some feature similar to this for Australia.. I am using a federal government operated index of every registered landmark, train station, suburb, river, etc that stores the geographical position [latitude and longtitude] And I use this in conjuction with an equation of Approximate Episoidal Distance to calculate to a fairly high degree of accuracy [200m to 500km] the distance between to given points. To figure out the items between said centre location and given radius though requires a bit of calculation. simply because in order to determine which 'elements' fall within given range you have to compute live the distance between requested location and each element stored in db. Somewhat painful therefore it is wise to somehow use other filters as well to choose what type of business/ etc I know this sounds somewhat inefficient, and therefore the only other way to simplify this is either to cache queries so any future queries that match the same source and range will save the processing and just display this results Again though depending on your business rollover these results may expire quickly and it isn't all that likely that given the timeframe you might set that another person might run the same range and source query anytime soon Therefore if you could conjure up sone form of indexing system to categorise quickly locations against a given reference point perhaps? For example break down locations in terms of "blocks" or something and then you can just perform this operation on any business that falls inside the block of the requested source location and adjacent blocks etc etc.. I have attached a library i wrote for my geolocate system on a site I am currently developing.. Its a start point to the implementation Of course you'd have to find where you can source a fairly up to date extensive postcode/zipcode/suburb database that links to geographical points to do this. Enjoy.. and Good luck! p.s. As a side note, I am not aware fully of American systems, and I do believe there are already in place some fairly comprehensive systems to do zipcode/locational distance calculations. Alot easier than I had to do in Aus. ---oOo--- Allowing users to execute CGI scripts in any directory should only be considered if: ... a.. You have no users, and nobody ever visits your server. ... Extracted Quote: Security Tips - Apache HTTP Server ---oOo--- ------oOo---------------oOo------ Julien Bonastre [The_RadiX] The-Spectrum Network CEO ABN: 64 235 749 494 julien@the-spectrum.org www.the-spectrum.org ------oOo---------------oOo------ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matty Sarro" <msarro@gmail.com> To: <php-db@lists.php.net> Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2006 8:17 PM Subject: [PHP-DB] First web app, ever, so please bear with me Greetings all! I am finally taken the plunge and started trying to develop a web application. I've got a fair amount of web design experience with straight up HTML, I've written a few scripts with perl, and I'm slightly familiar with SQL. This is to give you some background... I'm by no means experienced so please bear with me. Currently I'm using a forum to gather business reviews from subscribers to a website. Once a substantial number have been gathered, I want to use them to populate a database that can be appended to by users. The actual application (once data has been migrated) will have two uses: first, users should be able to search by geographic area for businesses based on zip code, town name, business name, distance from a given zipcode, etc. If a certain field isn't filled in, it should be assumed to be a wildcard (for instance, if a user would enter no business name, or town name, but they do enter 10 mile radius from 90210, then all businesses within 10 miles of 90210 that have reviews will be displayed). I'd like to use a similar form to allow users to submit reviews for new businesses. Most of this may seem pretty simple, but like I said, I've never worked with PHP before, or SQL, let alone both. And whats worse, I've got no idea how to do anything with the geographical code (the X mile radius from zip code Y thing). So, where would be a fair place to get started (besides the obvious php.net)? I hope this wasn't too vague - thanks again guys! Also, this is my first post, so please be gentle :) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.2/251 - Release Date: 4/02/2006