Question

I’m making a server side website for mobile devices. What I want to do is have a member system that users log into. After logging in their geolocation is sent to my database, which returns a list of destinations in the area (restaurants, stores etc.) This has been done I know, but I want the locations in the database to be user generated, they can submit their geolocation to the database and saved.

I know Flex, Actionscript, HTML, learning php/MySql. I’m confused by all the mapping options out there and what I need to use and don’t need to use.

Hoping someone can help me figure out what I need to do/use to accomplish my goal. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Here is what I would (and have) done before to achieve this…

1. Send the user’s latitude and longitude to a PHP file via XHR. Acquiring the user’s latitude and longitude is achieved using the Geolocation API using JavaScript. For fallback, you could use Google Gears and if that fails map the user’s IP to a location using an online service.
2. Use Google Maps API to map user submitted addresses to their latitude and longitude equivalent. Cache this lookup (no reason to spawn an additional HTTP request everytime).
3. Use the Great Circle Distance formula to calculate the distances between the user’s coordinates and other coordinates of locations in your database.
4. Return results ordered by distance of the item to your end user’s location.

This is pretty general overview but your question is rather general too.