I have an idea for a GUI application, however it needs a set of technologies that i do not use frequently (as such i am a bit of a novice here, apologies if this is stupid!).
I want a 3D Earth Model, (like google earth, the actual look to be like the terrain overlay in google maps (I don't care about roads, just height & position)). Like google maps & google earth i will wish to add my custom tracks & locations & boundaries; and move / pan / tilt etc...
I cannot however be continually connected to the internet. So i will need a 1 time download of terrain/geodata before i startup the program. (Can this be done as a single kml dataset ? (Is that even correct?) i guess i would need a 'local map server' instead of an internet connection?)
I will need to use a precompiled language (preferably java) to actually write the program in. (Scripting / Javascript is not acceptable) Can i interface Java & KML using an existing library ?
Is it possible to reproduce the google maps 'map window' with the terrain imaging in 3rd party software ? (Can i pull this from open source somewhere?)
Everything you want to do is possible -- however -- let me preface this by saying that it will be a long, difficult journey.
Let's start with the easy thing: you can load your data as KML, it will show up as a layer in Google Earth, and you'll be able to turn it on and off. You'll also be able to turn off default layers (roads, etc) either programmatically or via the GUI.
I would use Google Earth (the web plugin thing) tied to a C# application. You do not want to use the old Google Earth COM API. It was deprecated by Google as of GE 6, and was truly a terrible thing to work with. Java could also work, but I prefer C# development. In either case, you can use the language's ability to call into the Google Earth API directly.
Here's a good example (C#). It's GNU/GPL, so it may work as a base for your app:
http://code.google.com/p/winforms-geplugin-control-library/
Essentially, you load a Google Earth web page in a WebBrowser control, which allows you to manage it directly. Actually interfacing with the web page is the hard part (but still easier than the COM API!) -- hopefully you can use the control library linked above to get a feel for how it works.
As for your internet connectivity issue: yes -- Google Earth (even the web plugin) supports caching. The exact amount of cache that is allowed is ~100 MB. Exactly what goes in the cache is a complete mystery. The 100MB limit won't get you very far -- but you can create larger caches (up to 2GB) using the full Google Earth app. These caches work with the web browser plugin, you just have to copy the database file into the Google Earth application data directory (and rename the file I think -- the plugin appends a 0 or something to the file name.) The process for creating a cache is simple -- fly around the area in question at the altitude you'd like. There are tools to help automate this, such as:
http://bx11.110mb.com/gecacher.htm
Note that caching Google's data isn't exactly what they'd like you to do. So please keep in mind that you'll need to fully review the EULA to make sure you're not violating it...
Good luck! I've been working with GE in a large app for ~3 years; It's definitely a fun thing to work with and can make your application really stand out.
Related
Some relevant background:
My application is a Java app compiled into a .exe via JSmooth. The anticipated user base would likely be a few hundred users, but could grow well beyond that, as it's a community specific application.
How it works:
2 .jar files, one that preforms initial checks, another with the meat of the application.
Ideally, the init jar displays the splash, checks the version in desktop.txt against server.txt, if they differ, it prompts the user to update.
What I need to figure out:
1) What is a cheap, scalable hosting service that I could use as the file host for updates?
2) How can I create an "updater" to actually preform the jar replacement? My current solution is simply writing an updater in Java, but I was hoping for something like the installers people are more familiar with.
All of the research I've done has resulted in lackluster results, as 99% of hosting searches result in site hosting results. I just need an update repository with reasonable security. i.e., decent DDoS resistance and not left wide open to the Internet.
Edit: formatting
Easy to do and very foolish cheap with Amazon S3 or Joyent Manta as both support time-limited signed URLs and headers (which can contain a SHA-1 of the file) to check to see if the update is needed before downloading
On startup your app would check the update URL to see if it has changed. If it has changed, download the JARs. Do this before the app loads classes from those JARs. Updating the updater itself will be trickier so consider that an update might need a new update URL to prevent expiry.
I'm not sure if this question is entirely appropriate for SO but it seemed to work better here than in SuperUser so apologies if its in the wrong place. Happy to move it if so.
I'm trying to figure out how I'd automate the input of data into a system that didn't accept data uploads, but rather used forms put up on a screen. Use cases are e.g. where an enterprise wide system does accept uploads but the user lacks admin rights to fill in data she is required to populate, or with very old and specialized legacy systems where the functionality just doesn't exist and a serial input-review-rollback-commit cycle is enforced.
I'm not a programmer by trade so this is partly thought experiment but also to answer a question that has arisen at a business that I'm involved in.
I'm reasonably familiar with python and java if libraries for keyboard emulation exist but would be happy interpreting a pseudo code response too.
Responses that point to existing providers of such functionality that is embeddable or that tell me if I'm barking up the wrong tree also gratefully accepted.
Once again apologies as I know this isnt intuitively the best spot for this. Please do point me to a better location if you know of one.
Thanks
Possible solutions exist but they're all pretty bad
Is it a desktop application or a web application? If it's a web application you can use ghost.py to automate the interaction and submission of new records/entries. This work will be a glorious bundle of fun for the lucky code jockey who draws the short straw.
If it's a desktop application, it will be a great deal more difficult. Is it on Windows? Linux? MacOSX? Is the software written in Java? Using the Swing toolkit? AWT? SWT?
If it is a native Windows application you might be able to use Autohotkey to automate desktop interaction. This can be as basic as automatic clicks in pre-recorded parts of the screen, automating TAB keypresses to move around the input cells and reading input text from a data file and writing that out into the input cells. This will be even more entertaining than the web-solution mentioned earlier: truly the necessary ingredients for an authentic war story worthy of the annals of internet lore.
This is likely to be a lot of intricate work, error-prone, and subject to failure in the future if the UI of the software is changed; and such changes are very likely. It would be a lot easier to help if you could add more detail to the question.
Before embarking down this road, if I were you I would beg and plead with the software vendor to either provide me with an upload API; I would even offer to pay the vendor to upload my data for me. I cannot imagine either of the solutions I mentioned will be any cheaper, unless the work time of your developers has no value.
Good luck.
We have a web application that uses (java/Java EE, Struts, Hibernate) running on Apache tomcat using MySQL as the DB. It has been up and running for quite a few years, so we have a very large pool of data (millions of row).
We need to convert this web app to a mobile application (cross platform, ios, Android), so we've decided to use the Titanium Appcelerator.
I have quite a few concerns before implementation:
I've heard that titanium gives you very good gui, but what about the functionality? What happens when a user clicks a buttons (sending/retrieving data from db)?
Can I use java to handle this??
I have seen examples of interacting through database, but approx all are using PHP as as a server side language, but nobody knows PHP here.
Though our team has some android exp(all sort of JSON, small client app), I am not sure whether it would be helpful.
Out goal is to convert a huge CRUD web app to a cross platform mobile app (I dont want to lose java on the server). Can Titanium appcelerator handle this?
See the App as something separate. It doesn't matter what is on the other end, as long as you get either JSON or XML (or something else if you prefer).
Titanium Appcelerator is a JavaScript tool that can handle (both build-in) JSON and XML.
To answer your questions:
1: Functionality is really good. It cannot be done by Java, but you'll get events (in JavaScript) which handles click/swipe/press/doubleclick etc. Events are always defined in the Documentation. In your case, the button. You can see what events it can handle there, and what properties you can set.
An example from the docs page adding a button, and having the click event.
var button = Titanium.UI.createButton({
title: 'Hello',
top: 10,
width: 100,
height: 50
});
button.addEventListener('click',function(e)
{
Titanium.API.info("You clicked the button");
});
2: Whatever server side language you use, as long as you export usable content (JSON/XML) it is useable by Titanium. It acts like a client. No need to worry there.
3: as answered above, you can do everything with it you want. On server side you only need to write an API which can handle everything.
I hope this will take away your concerns. If you need more help on other questions, just enter a new question on SO and I'll see them pass by.
As already stated by Topener, Titanium is able to handle your requirements. I'd like to point out something more fundamental:
We need to convert this web app to a mobile application (..), so we've decided to use the Titanium Appcelerator.
I'm somewhat surprised by this reasoning, kinda "We needed a car, so we decided to buy a Nissan." Why not a Ford, a Holden or a Porsche?
There are in fact well over 30 technologies claiming to be able to do cross-platform mobile development. I took a deep look at 16 of them during the course of last year for my master's thesis.
I'd suggest you have a look two other technologies as well. Why? You are converting a web app to a mobile app. Why not consider a framework that allows you to write your app's UI using web technologies? You might be able to port some of the existing UI-code, after all.
PhoneGap (free, now owned by Adobe): You implement the entire app in JavaScript, basically as a WebApp, but you get a native, installable binary that can be distributed using the AppStores. Easy to combine with a SenchaTouch HTML5-UI.
Rhodes (free, now owned by Motorola Systems): You implement the UI in HTML5 and the logic in Ruby. Rhodes provides a really good Object-Mapper and Sync capabilities. As you seem to have quite a bit of data to handle, this could provide a significant advantage over Titanium's SQLite Database. Learning the bits of ruby should not cost you more than a week or so.
If you definitely need a native UI, then the AQUA-Framework might be worth a look... but I havn't tested that one.
I'm currently building a web application using Google Maps. Unfortunately, I've reached the absolute maximum limit that Javascript will reach for all of the different things I'd like to do, and we're exploring all of the alternatives.
We've looked at server-side caching and pre-generation/computing. It's definitely a possibility, but supposedly even that is 'too slow' while trying to plot 100k+ points in one go. As everything (as always) needs to always load instantly (or as near as darnit), I'm looking at a local application as an alternative.
Before I put forward the idea (which I already know that everyone will go for), there are two things I'm looking at first:
Can I use Google Maps locally?
I want to take the application between just PC and Mac. I'm a WPF and Web developer. Windows side, fine. Mac, however, doesn't play so nicely with those technologies. Is it time for me to bite the bullet and learn Java?
Thanks for your help!
No idea if this meets their TOS, but you could look into: http://www.howtogeek.com/90565/how-to-download-google-maps-for-offline-use/
Java AFAIK is the most main-stream high level cross-platform language for desktop applications.
Mono install rate on macs is probably extremely low in comparison to Java, though that might not be a problem if you use mkbundle. and WPF isn't supported (though GTK# is). You could do Silverlight/Moonlight, which are supported outside the browser, and quite similar to WPF.
You could also look at using C++ or Python with wxWidgets. Though if you go with Python, there are a ton of GUI libraries for it.
As I understand it, your map application involves plotting 100,000+ markers (latitude/longitude points) on a single map. You presently draw the markers on the map using JavaScript code and function calls.
Consider sticking with web-hosted Google Maps, and using one of two alternate implementation approaches.
Aggregate points. You can try drawing 100 markers onto the same screen pixel, but the user won't get any more information than if you just drew one marker. Consider aggregating multiple closely-spaced markers into aggregate markers. Google's docs have suggestions about how to do this in "Too Many Markers!", by Luke Mahe and Chris Broadfoot, Google Geo APIs Team, December 2010 (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/toomanymarkers.html).
Draw markers yourself onto custom map tiles. I'm involved with a maps application which uses the Webfoot Map Tile Generator code, which takes this approach to draw approx 50,000 dots on a map of the continental US marking the location of each US Zip Code. See (http://maps.webfoot.com/demos/election2008/), and in the left pane, under "Dots Layer", select "Zip Codes" in the pull-down menu. Drawing your own map tiles isn't easy, but it's very powerful, and the Webfoot code shows it can be fast. Google doesn't completely document how to do this. But start with their description of implementing "your own custom map type using GMapType" (code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/overlays.html#CustomMapTiles) in the Maps Javascript API v2. The equivalent for the Javascript API v3 appears to be missing from (code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/overlays.html#CustomMapTypes).
I am trying to make an application in which one component captures the screen of the user (for screen casting). I am aware that there are two options to achieve the same using a Java applet (please correct me if I am wrong). First is to use the java applet to take screen shots continuously and convert it into a video and upload it as a video file. And second is to create a java vnc server and record it as a .fbs file and play it using a player like: http://www.wizhelp.com/flashlight-vnc/index.html
I would like to know the best solution in terms of video quality, file size, cross-platform compatibility (windows and mac), firewall problems and finally ease of implementation.
I am very new to Java. Please tell me whats the best solution for my problem. Also, is it easy enough for me to program it on my own or should I get it developed via a freelancer. I have tons of programming experience (5+ years in LAMP) but none in Java.
Thank you very much.
I agree that this is pretty hard. I implemented those two solutions (VNC and onboard screen capture) plus a third (capture from an external VGA source via an Epiphan grabber) for a former employer. I had the best bandwidth-to-quality ratio with VNC, but I got higher framerate with VGA capture. In all three cases, I reduced the frames + capture times to PNGs and sequenced them in a QuickTime reference movie. Then I made flattened video (MPEG4 or SWF) of the results. In my case, I then synchronized the screen video with a DV stream.
In the end the technology worked (see a sample of the output) but our business model failed.
From what I know, the older versions of applet had security restrictions that may not allow for screen capture. Instead, a java application may be feasible.
Regarding the build-it-yourself vs the fire-a-coder, it depends on how you value your time compared to what you can find on a freelancer site.
I think you can find someone from India/Romania/Poland/Other countries that can make it for an affordable price
Given your Java knowledge and the difficulty of the task, have you considered taking an alternative approach? For example, how about a native VNC server for the end-user, which is just a small download and then they click "Run." And that native server is programmed to capture the screen and send it straight to your web server, which has a client like vnc2swf or other means of converting the VNC stream to a video or .fbs file? Does all that make sense?
Admittedly, without Java, you have to prepare one executable program per platform you want to support, however, I don't know. That still sounds easier to me. Consider Copilot.com. They are doing VNC but they still use small native apps for each platform.
Sorry but this seems the kind of job that requires a lot of experience. Even if you find code snippets all around the net to fix this and that, the overall result may be way worse than simply hiring an experienced Java programmer.