Google Finds Spiders in Your Backyard

The Google API team have added a new DragZoomControl to the list of available functions. This feature has been bandied about for quite some time and various people have hacked together approximations for this using other JavaScript functions. My interest in this isn't so much the zoom function as cool as that is, but the ability to query resources bound by the drawn box.

Kludging DragZoomControl to perform a spatial query isn't particularly practical or useful so I used a Yahoo YUI "Drag & Drop - Resizable Panel" to fix-up what I once using. What I used in the past that didn't perform well for Safari users was some scripting from Cross-Browser.com called the X Library. Now, with Yahoo's improvement on this, the function works as expected. Because it's very easy to add things that stay positioned within such a draggable box, the Yahoo YUI component is a much better solution. So, just like you can zoom in / zoom out with the Google DragZoomControl, so too can you put these functions within a draggable, resizable box. I'll also add that the resizing function in Yahoo's component is much smoother than Google's own DragZoomControl. Now the fun part...

Two little icons within the draggable, resizable box allow you to search for spider images or produce a spider species list, which are based on collections records submitted to The Nearctic Spider Database. Click HERE to try your hand at it and search for spiders in your back yard.

The advantage of such a simple function is that one need not have a spatial database like PostgreSQL, but can make use of any enterprise back-end. The query run is the typical minX, maxX, minY, maxY to define the four corner coordinates. With a ton of records in the backend however, the query can take a long time to complete so an index on the latitude and longitude columns may be required as explained in the Google API Group. If you want to see what you can do with a spatial database however, have a look at what programmers for the Netherlands Biodiversity Information Facility have put together.

Happy spider hunting...