One of the projects we’ve been working on for MapBuzz the last few weeks is building an interactive map that shows all the events going on in Denver during the Democratic National Convention. Users can pick the event type and date they are interested in, and the map refreshes with icons for relevant events. By clicking on a given event, the user can see exactly where and when the event is taking place. I think the map turned out pretty well – its a good example of mashup pulling data from different sources. In this case, base maps from Google, event information from Zvents, and all rendering/styling/page from MapBuzz.

It did clarify my thinking on a few points. First, Rails built-in page caching is really limited – it ignores query parameters and only works for html. So we had to hack around that, more info coming in a later post. Second, for building mashups xml really is superior to JSON simply because it supports namespaces (for all their pain points, namespaces really do facilitate merging of data from multiple sources). Third, when you need it, xslt is invaluable. Zvents serves its data using RSS, but our client only supports Atom. The simple solution was a quick xsl transformation to convert Zvent’s rss feed over to Atom using libxslt (and thus MapBuzz’s contribution back to the Ruby community to get the libxml and libxslt bindings back into good shape).