Isaac Whatever

I've been working on a hobby project lately - a webapp running on google app engine that gets location data from Fire Eagle and displays it in a google map on the page.

To do this I had to slightly modify Steve Marshall's excellent python Fire Eagle API. Make no mistake, I suck at python, and I only edited Mr. Marshall's API until it stopped throwing errors. As soon as it worked for me I stopped, leaving the work half finished.

Here is Mr. Marshall's API, and this is my version modified for google app engine. I really only changed the http module. His version used httplib, which is unsupported in the app engine environment. Urlfetch is used instead.

After that, it was off to the races. I used google's RPC example for app engine to pass my location data from the python (and database) to javascript on the client, after which I copied totally from the google maps beginner example for adding a map and markers.

That part went very smoothly - I practically made the google maps example into the django template for my maps page.

My app is far from finished (it really depends on mobile devices), but these wonderful mashable services made it lots of fun.

Thanks especially to Steve Marshall. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that Fire Eagle API.

When my app is finally finished, I'll let you all know, of course!
-Isaac

Labels: api, app engine, fire eagle, fireeagle, google, google app engine, google maps, location aware, location aware apps, maps, mashup, mashups, python, thank you steve marshall, yahoo fire eagle