JD on EP

One of the reasons I left (NOT ABANDONED) the Flash environment was that it became so complicated dealing with the server environment. I--and my clients--just couldn't buy into CF, which caused a problem. Eventually Flash was just so incredibly wired into the CF environment that extending it into a .NET environment became problematic and hateful at best. If the connections were there, they certainly weren't apparent. Perhaps one can blame the marketing department. Whatever.

I'm still an avid Flash user, but I'm still using Flash MX, not 7 or 8. That speaks to a point here about Maps & cetera and TRAFFIC info--which is my specialty (consider me Mr. Traffic in the programming biz). It is this: go to the fundamentals.

REAL traffic info must be interchangeable. It must deal with mapping, data, data exchange, PD-CAD (police Computer-Aided-Dispatch), Fire Dispatch, and other data. It must deal with ARC-INFO, ARC-GIS, and other mapping systems. For a nice web display, it must have FLASH. For data transformation on an enterprise scale, it must have ORACLE or MSSQL (not CF). It must TRANSFORM between formats (i.e., convert between and among Flash, SVG, DWG, so on and so forth). Dynamically. Nevermind a $15,000 Flex environment when a $800 Turbine component will do the job.

Also, the transformation coordinates must exist between and among mapping coordinates (State Plane, UTM, etc.) The coordinates must have transformation routines between and among PUBLIC data sets (TIGER) and PRIVATE data sets (ARC-GIS/ARC-INFO, DXF, DWG). This interchange must be consistent and workable. It's there, if you dig deep enough.

Once you get to the core of the issue, nothing Google, Yahoo, or Macromedia (Adobe) or anyone else provides is truly unique or indispensable. It is all derivative. They have the fundamentals down, but the lard-based icing on the cake is enough to kill, if not just suffocate, the developer. Nevermind the associative heart-attack.

To escape this derivative mind-set, developers need to think inductively (go to the original data sets), rather than operate deductively (i.e., take from Google or Yahoo).

I guess what I am saying is this: traffic engineering issues will benefit a great deal from a ground-up conceptualization of the data sets and the presentation formats. Nothing so far even comes close to realizing the potential or reality of the issues and problems.

In the end programming solutions are no different than thinking originally about chemistry or biology or paleontology. It often takes a willingness to look at the fundamentals, develop a taxonomy, create hypotheses, test them, then build the theory upon the successful hypotheses. It sometimes means working hard to find out what works between and among systems, and sometimes it means settling for less than the newest and greatest fad, if in fact the new stuff works better than the old stuff--which is no guarantee, in fact the latter is more of a promise than the comfortable certainty of the former.

Biological evolution teaches us one hard and immutable fact: just because something is new or different doesn't mean it is better. It is simply different, not necessarily better.

So, I recommend every fool jump on the Google, Yahoo, or whatever bandwagon. As Shakespeare once said, there are more possibilities than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Jump in that fad-pool, guys and gals. Don't be surprised if it's not as warm nor true as you originally thought as you jumped into it with all your lemming friends.

At least that's my thinking on the subject.....

Rob W