Mark Roedel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > I have a question related to image mapping backend database information
> > I hope someone can help me with. I have a customer who wants to
> > graphically display his sales force within a certain area of the city
> > over the web. Therefore if he wanted to see the concentration of his
> > sales force in the city he would click on the button and all salesmen
> > within the city limits would show up, maybe with little flags denoting
> > the sales people. Queries could be performed so that only sales people
> > with certain skill set would show up. Clicking on the flag would yield
> > the name and address of the sales person. I would like to know how
> > something like this could be accomplished using the linux operating
> > system and mysql, since that is my operating system and database of
> > choice. Price is an issue but will not be the deal breaker. I would like
> > to keep cost down, but I also want to put out a competitive product.
>
> If you haven't already, you might have a look at PHP. It's a server-side
> scripting module that can either run as a CGI, or as a compiled-in module
> for several httpd's, including Apache. Includes support for connections
> to MySQL databases, as well as the ability to generate GIF images on the
> fly. And the price is right (free!).
>
> http://www.php.net/
The keyword is GD by Thomas Boutell. It's a c-lib for generating and
modifying gif images.
Like Mark says you should definitely checkout php which supports both
gd and mysql. But gd support is also available for many other
programming languages (perl, python, tcl, etc.)
For your project at hand, php/mysql/apache/gd would be very usefull
indeed. One limitation of the gd toolkit is however that it will not
allow you to merge separate images. It does allow you to add new
elements to existing images, but these new elements will have to be
constructed from primitives (dots,lines, arcs, rectangles, etc). Have
you tried to figure out the algorithms for anti-aliasing lately ?
If you really want to get funky take another, totally different
approach. Much more powerful, but somewhat more complex would be to
use the net-fu approach: Use the gimp <http://www.gimp.org> in server
mode as your imageprocessing backend, and write your own
scheme-scripts to do all kinds of funky stuff to you maps.
You can then do anything you want to many, many different imagetypes.
--
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Paul Stevens mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
NET FACILITIES GROUP PGP: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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