FlickrBrowse: Flickr + FeatureServer in Action
One of the cool things about FeatureServer is its ability to load data from other APIs, even when those APIs are not really ‘geo’ related. The main example of this in the existing code is the Flickr datasource, which allows you to load data from Flickr as all the formats that FS supports, like WFS.
Last night, I sat down with the intention of using this in some way. I was able to hack together half of what I wanted in about an hour, and I hacked together the other half this morning in another hour.
Announcing…
FlickrBrowse: Browsing the World’s Interesting Flickr Images via OpenLayers
Using Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ sort, I’ve put together a map of the recent flickr geo photos, ordered by interestingness. You can limit photos by username/user id, and clicking the photos gives you little infobubbles with a link to the original photo.
The code is quite simple (view source to see it), and it provides a relatively cool service.
I think this is the kind of thing that OpenLayers and FeatureServer are all about: making it easier to integrate disparate datasets into a single interface. In this case, doing the transformation on the client would be difficult, so we do it on the server, and the client sees it as ‘just another WFS’.