Programming tips

The mystery behind the programming of the LA Times homicide map is now solved!

Thanks to Eric Ulken, editor of interactive technology at latimes.com, I now have an answer for how they built their amazing homicide map that I blogged about a while back. So, specifically for those programmers out there, here is his response to my inquiry:

“The UI is actually AJAX-based, and the underlying database app is built in PHP. I believe the database app talks to the UI through JSON rather than XML, but it’s basically the same thing. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that, because I didn’t build it; I just designed it and wrote some requirements that a couple of clever programmers on our tech staff executed brilliantly.

Since then, we’ve started doing more of our UI work in Flash (see Los Angeles Connections), and we’ve been playing with Django as a framework for building database apps (see California’s War Dead).”

Whew! Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with AJAX, JSON, and Django. However, I can admit that after receiving his email those have gone on my long list of programs and languages to learn!

Other posts that might interest you:

• “Django 1.0 Template Development” book review

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