daSilva presentation at GEOIDE 2009

Networking Farmers Markets And Consumers ‐ The Growing Pains Of Desktop To Server Side, Korbin Dasilva This poster shows a geospatial application that networks rural farmers and the products they produce to urban consumers of famer market goods. The project moves away from traditional geomatics software such as ArcGIS to focus on web‐based applications on a Geoweb platform (the latter sometimes referred to as Neogeography). In the application, a web browser accepts information from farmers on what products they offer on what days and where. This information is then stored via the web server in a MySQL database. On the consumer side, consumers of farmer market goods are prompted by a widget asking what products they prefer, where they live, and what days they wish to shop. A query is formed from the data in the widget and sent to the web server and then to the MySQL database. The appropriate data is returned to the web browser and a Google Map API for easy viewing. What the consumers see is a Google Map fixing their location and the location of the farmers’ retail outlets that match the requested query. The project encapsulates a number of different programming scripts, languages and development environments that are often unknown to the average geographer, including MySQL, PHP, HTML, Javascript and Apache. The poster also focuses on the often awkward switch from traditional desktop GIS to server side applications. Many may feel confident doing complex analysis on traditional GIS, but when one moves to the unfamiliar realm of server side applications numerous new challenges emerge. My poster will address this switch and how to make it less painful for the traditional geomatics/geography student in university.