From wade at adventure101.com  Thu Jun 16 16:08:26 2005
From: wade at adventure101.com (Wade Guthrie)
Date: Thu Jun 16 16:08:57 2005
Subject: [Travelpub] TravelPub design
Message-ID: <42B2066A.9060805@adventure101.com>

Hi all,

I really appreciate the time that everyone has put into thinking about 
TravelPub.  I figured that, at this point, I should start getting my 
butt in gear so we can go to the TravelPub design stage.  I'll change 
the version of the current requirement document to 1.0 (no alpha 
designation) but please feel free to comment on the requirements even so.

For the design, I was thinking of something along the lines of the 
following:

  TravelPub Server <---> Itinerary <---> TravelPub Client
  ----------------       ---------       ----------------
    html pages              xml             (various)
    cgi scripts
     ^      ^
     |      |
     v      v
  UserDB  LocationDB
  ------  ----------
  mySql   mySql

The user would interface with the TravelPub server through the 
www.travelpub.org website and the cgi scripts, below that, that would 
interact with the user database and the location database.  The 
TravelPub server would generate web pages, as needed, and (eventually) 
an XML itinerary.  Then, there'd be some Perl scripts that would take 
the XML base document and generate a web page, a flat file (to be 
printed), or (on a Palm, for example) there'd be a program that'd read 
the XML and display it to the user.

I figured we'd use XHTML with CSS for the web pages unless someone has a 
compelling reason not to do it this way.  Is that going to get read 
properly by all the standard browsers?

I know I have a huge amount to learn about SQL to do bunches of this but 
it wouldn't be any fun if I didn't learn anything.

In addition to the standard "PLEASE comment on this if you have any 
better ideas or questions or plaudits or whatever", I have some 
questions I'd like to throw at the developers at large. 

1) Erik: you had suggested using a series of points to indicate a 
location so that it could take-up actual space.  How would a variable 
number of data elements be done in an SQL database (or is that a really 
stupid question)?

2) Erik: you had suggested that each location (whether it be a continent 
or a phone booth) have exactly the same structure inside the database.  
Is there a size issue with the database with this or is there no big 
deal, here?

3) Erik: you had a user ranking system you wanted to use (I think it was 
among the stuff found at www.advogato.org).  Do you still like this 
system (i.e., should I go ahead and put it in the design document), are 
there modifications you'd like to make to it, or is there a different 
approach you think we should take?

4) Erik: questions 1,2, and 3 are the major points I remember from our 
discussions -- what am I forgetting?

5) All: I'm having some trouble with mapping.  The best I can figure, we 
should lay-out maps as a hierarchical grid.  Each square of the grid 
could be another map with its own grid system.  Features wouldn't span 
grid squares (a freeway, for example, would be a series of segments on a 
bunch of squares).  This way, finding all of features of some time 
(e.g., restaurants) inside a specific radius from some location would be 
relatively simple: find the squares inside that radius and then 
calculate the distance from the features in each of the squares to the 
location we're interested in.  This is just my first cut and map 
calculation technology is probably much more sophisticated than this -- 
does anyone know any better ways to do this or, at least, where we 
should look for this kind of information?

6) All: I originally had the idea that we'd generate maps dynamically 
using GPS information from the users.  While that's doable, it probably 
means we won't have maps for a while and they'll look sort-of stupid 
when we do.  Is there somewhere we can get maps (primarily city maps) 
the we can digitize and not get into any kind of copyright hot water?

I plan to detail all of this stuff (including the layout of the web page 
tree) in the design document.

Does anyone have any comments / questions?

-- 
Wade Guthrie
wade@adventure101.com