Vacation Project - Blog GEO Beacon

This week I got a much needed break with my family. We went up to the Wisconsin Dells for the first time. This place is crazy! My wife says it's like a "family" version of Las Vegas. I absolutely agree.

Besides hanging out at the pool and on the water slides with my kids I also had a project in mind I wanted to complete. I blogged a few weeks back about my BlackBerry 8830 and I still love it. One of it's cool features is a built-in GPS chip set.

Since my kids are still young (under 4 years) I have plenty of time in the evening where my wife and I are imprisoned in our hotel room. My plan was to build three applications to allow my BlackBerry to communicate my GEO coordinates to my blog here. Like so:

The first application would reside on my BlackBerry. It's job is to communicate my device and GPS data to a server application to be saved at a given interval. I am sending and saving things like:

• Device Id
• Latitude
• Longitude
• Altitude
• Distance
• Speed
• and Time

The second application sits on the server and saves the data sent to it into a database table. It also returns a geo-coded RSS feed when requested. The geo-coded RSS feed for my device is found at http://whirrl.com/geo-feed/851582166.

Lastly the third application is a maps mash-up (in this case Google Maps) to show my last known coordinates on my blog.

Everything seems to be working ok so far. I've placed a little map on the right gutter of my blog that shows my last know coordinates.

All in all this was a pretty interesting adventure. I had to remember back about 7 years to my Java days. The BlackBerry uses a Java based operating system so the applications that run on it are written in Java. Then for the server-side I got to play around with some fun PHP and Apache Rewrite Header goodness. Lastly for the maps I fiddled and tweaked JavaScript and a tiny bit of CSS.

Hmm... the more I think about it I really touched a lot of different technology during this vacation! Let see... to build this handy little system I had to touch the following languages and syntax:

• Java
• PHP
• SQL
• JavaScript
• CSS

and I had to touch these operating systems:

• Macintosh OS X (10.4.10)
  
• Vista
• Windows Server 2003
• BlackBerry OS 4.2.2
  

and I had to work with these integrated development environments (IDE's):

• NetBeans
• Enterprise Manager
• Query Analyzer
  
• TextPad
• TextMate
• Blogger (eh, I'll count it)

Phew, good thing I don't specialize! Based on interest level, in a future article I may publish the step by step how-to of the whole ordeal. If you want to know more please leave a comment below.