The app the my team and I built got a big patch yesterday. I rebuilt the search class that drives all the front end searching in our application. When I replaced the results class early last year I referred to it as heart surgery. This would be more like a complete skin replacement while adding a couple eextra fingers for good measure. In addition to cleaning up, increasing the speed, decreasing the load, and making the system more expandable I also added a new type of search to our system.

IDX Broker Map Search

This is the single most requested feature for our app. Our map search is built using the google maps API. Google’s not the fastest mapping solution out there, but they have the largest development community and they’re constantly adding features. During development, for example, they added the terrain view as well as the ability to embed entire pages inside the map info bubbles.

In addition to the new search class I completely overhauled the way we clean and catalog our MLS data. The new system is more adaptive than the old and removes a fair amount of repeated code in the data acquisition portion of our app. It also allowed for the 3_rd new feature released yesterday which was a new customizable advanced search system. Our clients now have the ability to alter what fields show up on their advanced search page as well as being able to control the order that they appear and their size all via a drag and drop GUI.

The whole system took about 4 months of work over a 6 month span of time. Much of that was devoted to making sure the new system was entirely backwards compatible with the old system. We have so many clients that there’s no way we could have released a product that would negatively affect the system because it would have take too many man hours to clean it up.

Here’s a link to one of our local clients that uses our system heavily.
HFS Group

My next project involves Amazon’s web services.

There’s a trend I’ve noticed with my coding that goes back to the first time I picked up the camel book and taught myself how to program. There are certain techniques and tools which I at first despised and later learned to love.

For me it started with multi-dimensional arrays. I think most programmers can look back at their earliest days and sympathize with me there. If it’s not something you’re seen before it can be tough to wrap your brain around it. Now it’s they’re one of the most used tools in my chest and a 4 dimensional array is no harder for me to follow than a 1D array is.

The next big one I remember hating early on was mySQL heap tables. I was always convinced that if I was clever enough with joins, unions and the like that temporary tables shouldn’t be necessary. Now I understand that even if that’s true it’s often less efficient than using a heap table. Come to think of it, I didn’t think much of joins or unions at first either.

Most recent in my love/hate list is the ternary operator.
<?php
$x = 1;
($x==1) ? (print '$x is equal to 1') : (print '$x is not equal to 1');
?>
I first saw it as strange and ugly but I’ve come see it as very elegant. It’s especially nice when using it to control HTML layout. That brings me to the opposite end of the love-hate spectrum and my growing hatred of curly brackets. Being rid of them might be difficult as long as I’m using C based languages though.

I’ve been sporadically looking for a fix for this for nearly a year now and I finally came up with a solution.

The problem is that there is a bug that causes the blinking caret to disappear (and not give any indication of cursor position or focus) in any form input of text area field that is within an absolutely positioned div. I’ve seen various fixes crop up all the time and Mozilla has said that it will be fixed with version3.0, but who wants to wait for that. What I finally came up with that worked is:
#positionedDiv form { overflow: auto; }

Adding that to my style sheet magically made the caret come back.

In other news, I’m 4 working days from rolling out the new search class for the application we develop at idx. I’ve been working on it on and off since August and and really looking forward to having it off my plate once and for all. Still it makes for a stress filled week.