Last night tropical storm Cindy slammed into my apartment in New Orleans and of course I got to thinking about that hurricane tracker we discussed a while back. But first a quick post storm rant. This morning I awoke to the minimal damage of the storm and promptly checked my wife’s college’s website to see if they were open. As of 7:15am CST campus was fine, supposedly. On the ride to campus things started looking bad with downed power lines and streetlights not working, but we listened to the local NPR station that is located on the college’s campus and they said nothing of a closure. We get there and power is out all over campus and all the buildings are locked. I pull out the Treo600 to check the college site again and… Campus Closed! This ticks me off only cause the radio station based in the center of campus didn’t even announce the closure till an hour later! O.K. rant off and back to Flash.

Looking at the XML for the National Hurricane Center (NHC) Atlantic storm feed, I notice that it doesn’t actually contain coordinates for hurricane. This brings up a huge issue that makes our storm application much harder to accomplish. So let’s change our concept. Hire PHP/ASP/JSP/CF programmer to write dynamic web page that grabs the feed and creates an XML file on our server that Flash will access to create the storm track. Or, we can have our Flash file still grab the feed but return links from feed entries that are titled ‘Tropical Storm’ or ‘Hurricane’ and make sure the next words in the entry title are all caps. Plus looking at the NHC feed will give more clues for parsing etc. The only question is, should this application be real time or saved over time. The NHC has per storm feeds so the application could be a real time XML reader. What do you think?