SiG Wifi Locater
This is my hack using the new GoogleMap API. I threw it together over the course of 2 nights. Its purpose is to serve as an example on howto integrate the GoogleMap API with your Geographical Data. First thing you will need is some geographical information... at the very least some lat/long points. I took all the WiFi APs I found using netstumbler and uploading the .ns1 file to wigle.net (to triangulate the AP's location). From the wigle.net query form I copy/pasted the data into a text file (e.g. 94130.dat). Then using PHP I developed a simple Javascript XmlHttpInterop (a.k.a. "AJAX") script to parse the data and plot the points on the map. The Google Maps API Docs give an example of pulling a data.xml file from the server and parsing it into a dom tree and then iterating over the nodes and forming GMarkers. However, after reading "A Simpler Ajax Path" Re-Parsing Xml into javascript dom-structures almost seems redundant... especially if your outputing that Xml from a more powerful language. It just makes more sense to return back simple js statements and eval() them on the client-side (however the case may be that you can only get the information in xml format). Also, using Google's example I ran into variable scoping problems related to event listeners attached to HTML elements (for more on that read "Object-Oriented Event Listening through Partial Application in JavaScript", and take a look at my original implementation index.html.orig). The xmlrpc-parse-wigle.php source is pretty simple, it basically just loads the .dat file and echos the relavant js statements to plot the points on the map. For some reason, in firefox you will get a "this script is taking too long" error, but if you cancel it out it seems to still work fine (it has not crashed my browser... yet). To add more cities you just create more .dat files, and include references to them in the "Select City" dropdown. All code is released under the terms outlined in the GPL and available for download from my sourceforge.net project website
Instructions:
Select a City to view, then select a AP from the listing to focus in on a particular hotspot
