Its hurricane season and I’ve been on the lookout for a Flash-based hurricane tracker. After I found one on DEMCO’s site I started to ponder the idea of a new dynamic hurricane tracker. Why not take an RSS feed from the National Hurricane Center website and create a Flash front end that reads the feed like XML and parses the information into a dynamic Hurricane tracker map?
Potential issues: The history of the feed will need to be stored somewhere so the Flash project can animate the progress of a storm from start to finish. The feeds that NHC offers will need to be parsed to gain the location information on each storm as the contents of the feed are not already broken up into specific information.
Hmmm, any takers?
1. Sounds fun. Maybe I'll take a look at the rss feed this weekend and begin work on the server side portion. I've been looking for something to use some of the updated php flash remoting. I'll play around with storing the xml data into a database then, then serving it up to flash.
:)
Posted at 11:23AM on Jun 21st 2005 by Tim Walling