Thursday, August 23, 2007

PHP With Postgresql

Generally with PHP My sql is used. PHP is the most widely used Apache module available and provides a strong platform for Web application development. However, most people who use PHP with open source databases use PHP with MySQL.

Example of PHP with Postgresql:

Making the Connection

There are two direct ways to make a connection to PostgreSQL using PHP. They are pg_connect() and pg_pconnect(). The syntax of the two connections is very similar. However, functionally, they are a bit different. The pg_connect() function will create a new connection for each instance of the function. On the other hand, pg_pconnect() will reuse an existing connection to PostgreSQL if one is available.

The following is a simple example of opening a database connection to PostgreSQL:

$connection = pg_connect("dbname=mydb user=myuser host=localhost");
?>

To do the same with pg_pconnect, the syntax is nearly identical:

$connection = pg_pconnect("dbname=mydb user=myuser host=localhost");
?>

The previous examples open a connection to the database "mydb" on the local host, as the "myuser" user. If the user= parameter is omitted, the user that will be authenticated is the system user that your Web server is running as (for example, "nobody").

The next step would be to actually send a command or query to the PostgreSQL database. This is done in conjunction with the pg_connect() function by using the pg_exec() function.

$connection = pg_connect("dbname=mydb user=myuser");
$myresult = pg_exec($connection, "SELECT * FROM id,username,fname,lname where id > 100");
?>

The previous example will connect and execute a query, but not much else. You only have to pass the $connection variable if you have more than one connection to choose from (for example, if you have opened two connections with the pg_connect() function). Therefore, the following code would function identically, if you intend on having only one connection:

pg_connect("dbname=mydb user=myuser");
$myresult = pg_exec("SELECT * FROM id,username,fname,lname where id > 100");
?>

If you wanted to make this code a bit more robust, you could add some exception handling:

$connection = pg_connect("dbname=mydb user=myuser");
if (!$connection) {
print("Connection Failed.");
exit;
}
$myresult = pg_exec($connection, "SELECT * FROM id,username,fname,lname where id > 100");
?>

Now we have a connection to PostgreSQL that will alert you if the connection fails. Also, we are executing a simple query. We are not, however, processing the results of the query we sent. Thus, we will want to add some logic on the result set as shown in the following bit of code:

// make our connection
$connection = pg_connect("dbname=mydb user=myuser");

// let me know if the connection fails
if (!$connection) {
print("Connection Failed.");
exit;
}

// declare my query and execute
$myresult = pg_exec($connection, "SELECT * FROM id,username,fname,lname where id > 100");

// process results
for ($lt = 0; $lt < pg_numrows($myresult); $lt++) {
$id = pg_result($myresult, $lt, 0);
$username = pg_result($myresult, $lt, 1);
$fname = pg_result($myresult, $lt, 2);
$lname = pg_result($myresult, $lt, 3);

// print results
print("User Id: $id
\n");

print("Username: $username
\n");

print("First Name: $fname
\n");

print("Last Name: $lname
\n");

}
?>

Magento, Your Next Ecommerce Plateform

The updated open source for the ecommerce will be introduce shortly in Aug-2007. Name of this open source is Magento. It has improved features of Ecommerce as well as bloging.

Some exciting things about magento are listed below:

No Constraints:

As a professional open-source eCommerce solution, Magento allows the flexibility to create an online store that's exactly what your business needs without extra clutter or constricting design limits. Never feel trapped in your eCommerce solution again.

Completely Scalable

Whether your store grows overnight or over a year, don't spend valuable time worrying about your solution not growing with you. With Magento, your site is completely scalable.

Professional and Community Support

Unlike many other open-source eCommerce solutions available, Magento offers professional, reliable support, as well as the help of its passionate community.

Smooth Integration

Integrating third-party solutions should never be a hassle. Magento's easy integration will help save you time and resources as you create a customized store around your business needs.

Cutting Edge Features

Don't pay extra for features like product tagging, multi-address shipping or product comparison systems. Instead, get these and more right out of the box with Magento.

There are three catagory of features of Magento

1. Customer Features:


2. Administration Panel


3. General

Saturday, August 11, 2007

HOW TO SET RULES IN POSTGRESQL?

PostgreSQL supports a powerful rule system for the specification of views and ambiguous view updates. Originally the PostgreSQL rule system consisted of two implementations:

  • The first one worked using tuple level processing and was implemented deep in the executor. The rule system was called whenever an individual tuple had been accessed. This implementation was removed in 1995 when the last official release of the PostgreSQL project was transformed into Postgres95.

  • The second implementation of the rule system is a technique called query rewriting. The rewrite system} is a module that exists between the parser stage and the planner/optimizer. This technique is still implemented.

Procedure For creating rule:

We can define new rule by the command listed below:

CREATE RULE — Defines a new rule
CREATE RULE name AS ON event
TO object [ WHERE condition ]
DO [ INSTEAD ] [ action | NOTHING ]
Where the inputes indicates :

name

The name of a rule to create.

event

Event is one of select, update, delete or insert.

object

Object is either table or table.column.

condition

Any SQL WHERE clause, new or old can appear instead of an instance variable whenever an instance variable is permissible in SQL.

action

Any SQL statement, new or old can appear instead of an instance variable whenever an instance variable is permissible in SQL.

The Postgres rule system allows one to define an alternate action to be performed on inserts, updates, or deletions from database tables or classes. Currently, rules are used to implement table views.

The semantics of a rule is that at the time an individual instance is accessed, inserted, updated, or deleted, there is a old instance (for selects, updates and deletes) and a new instance (for inserts and updates). If the event specified in the ON clause and the condition specified in the WHERE clause are true for the old instance, the action part of the rule is executed. First, however, values from fields in the old instance and/or the new instance are substituted for old.attribute-name and new.attribute-name.

The action part of the rule executes with the same command and transaction identifier as the user command that caused activation.

For Example Look at the below shown example:

Make Sam get the same salary adjustment as Joe:

CREATE RULE example_1 AS
ON UPDATE emp.salary WHERE old.name = "Joe"
DO
UPDATE emp
SET salary = new.salary
WHERE emp.name = "Sam";
At the time Joe receives a salary adjustment, the event will become true and Joe's old instance and proposed new instance are available to the execution routines. Hence, his new salary is substituted into the action part of the rule which is subsequently executed. This propagates Joe's salary on to Sam.

Make Bill get Joe's salary when it is accessed:

CREATE RULE example_2 AS
ON SELECT TO EMP.salary
WHERE old.name = "Bill"
DO INSTEAD
SELECT emp.salary
FROM emp
WHERE emp.name = "Joe";

Deny Joe access to the salary of employees in the shoe department (current_user returns the name of the current user):


CREATE RULE example_3 AS
ON
SELECT TO emp.salary
WHERE old.dept = "shoe" AND current_user = "Joe"
DO INSTEAD NOTHING;

Create a view of the employees working in the toy department.

CREATE toyemp(name = char16, salary = int4);

CREATE RULE example_4 AS
ON SELECT TO toyemp
DO INSTEAD
SELECT emp.name, emp.salary
FROM emp
WHERE emp.dept = "toy";

All new employees must make 5,000 or less

CREATE RULE example_5 AS
ON INERT TO emp WHERE new.salary > 5000
DO
UPDATE NEWSET SET salary = 5000;


Friday, August 3, 2007

10 things a PHP IDE has to have

There are so many PHP IDE's out today and it is very hard to choose between them. In my investigations I have found that though there are many they all fall short when it comes to the basic needs of a PHP developer.
Before I continue and review some of those PHP IDE's here is a list of 10 things a PHP coding program has to have.

  1. One-click project creation by choosing a directory with. Too many PHP IDE's have multi-step project creation. Some even have strange functions where you have to add files to the project and delete them. Adding and deleting a file from a project should be as easy as going to the file system and moving or removing the file. I don't want to delete a file from a project and find it hanging out in the project folder later. Some might think this is cool, but it is not.
  2. Local filesystem viewer that shows the filesystem tree without having to enter a drive letter. If I cannot see the file system from the IDE it's uninstall and delete followed by some violent thoughts directed at the software maker.
  3. A PHP debugger that works out of the box with a local webserver. No PHP IDE has this yet. I consider it the holy grail of the PHP software world. No matter how much support software manufactures offer it never covers this aspect of using an IDE enough. Frequently the only reason for purchasing or using an IDE rather than a text editor is to get debugging features.
  4. A HTML toolbar. Why do PHP IDE makers think PHP developers want to type out and can remember all HTML? After all they are buying or downloading the IDE to ease the task of having to type things character by character. CSS is also much more important nowadays as is javascript, they should be included.
  5. Price is in second place after debugging. When you think about it you might see that the top commercial IDE makers are probably guilty of price fixing. Why they think that PHP developers will pay $300 for their software is beyond me. I myself would not pay that kind of money for a Java program that is buggy and runs slow as molasses. You want three hundred bucks? Give me everything on this list in a blinding fast program written in C , Delphi or Visual Basic.
  6. Drag and Drop text that does not bug out when used. All PHP IDE's seem to have this in common. Using drag and drop or marking long rows of text cause jumping, jitter and the disappearance of the pointer. Some even scroll to a "home" area on the screen when too much text is marked.
  7. Fast start times. Okay, let's skip the slow Java debate and go straight to the core. I want my 2.5gz processor to start the IDE in the same time that it can start Word or Open Office. Waiting a minute is ridiculous. Again here commercial vendors may want to take note. If the program costs more than $300, I deduct $10 from the retail price for each second that it takes to start the program.
  8. File backups on save and timed backups of working files. I cannot stress how important this is. Without backups the program becomes a danger to use. I always find myself making several copies of files as I work to give me a stepping back or history capability. I would be nice if an IDE had a savable history or versioning capability. But plain backup is a must.
  9. A TO DO list function. It should be simple with a title and text body. The list should appear per project. I get tired of seeing TO DO lists functions that require that I do more than just jot down the thought in my head.
  10. Intellisense. This is a must. But also one has to wonder why regular HTML is never included in intellisense. Intellisense I feel is being used as an excuse for not including the other things need to produce a proper PHP application
Source: PHP Developer

K-Meleon: The new Gecko rendering engine developed for Mozilla

About K-Meleon

K-Meleon 1.0 is released under the GNU General Public? License. K-Meleon uses the Gecko rendering engine developed for Mozilla which provides excellent support for current HTML, CSS and DOM standards. This version contains portions of Mozilla 1.8.

What's New, Improved and Fixed in This Release

New

  • Mozilla 1.8.0.5 backend.
  • Native Dialogs for UI improvement and preferences support for cookies, passwords, permissions.
  • Localization of cfg files.
  • Find bar.
  • Autocomplete in URL bar, improved navigation, security state dependent color.
  • Site icons support and drag&drop from URL bar.
  • Open/Save Dialog for download.
  • Download preferences panel.
  • Advanced preferences panel.
  • Possibility to set a custom profile path.

Improved

  • Web search and proxies support.
  • Overall improvements for macros and menus.
  • Title support in history viewer.
  • Bookmarks toolbar support.
  • See the changelog for details.

Fixed

System Requirements

  • Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server fully supported. Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, Windows NT 4.0 generally supported with updated Microsoft libraries.
  • 32 MB RAM minimum recommended.
  • 5 MB of free hard drive space for download. 15 MB of free hard disk space for full installation.

Download

  • The K-Meleon 1.0 installer is available here.
  • A .7z file is available here (you need 7-Zip).

Installation Notes

Installation

    1. If you have previously installed a version of K-Meleon older than 1.0, make sure to uninstall any previous versions before continuing the installation for this version. Uninstalling the previous version will remove all of the configuration and preference files. If you wish to save these files to use with K-Meleon 1.0, please make a copy of all of the directories under "K-Meleon\Profiles" and save them outside the K-Meleon installation directory before uninstalling K-Meleon.
    2. It is recommended that you exit all programs before running the Setup program.
    3. Double-click on the kmeleon10.exe file to start the Setup process. At any time in the process that you need to stop the K-Meleon installation, click on the Cancel button.
    4. Follow the on-screen instructions in the Setup program. When completed, you will be given the option of letting K-Meleon start automatically.
    5. If you wish to use your old configuration and preference files with K-Meleon 1.0, please review the details on Migrating Profiles.

Javascript

  • K-Meleon has built-in support to run ECMAScript (a.k.a. JavaScript).

Java Applets

  • You must first install the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run Java applets in K-Meleon. Once installed, K-Meleon automatically detects your JRE installation and no other configuration is necessary.
  • K-Meleon has been tested with JRE 1.5. You can download JRE 1.5 from http://java.com/. To see if JRE is properly installed, type about:plugins in the URL bar. If you see Java Plug-in listed, K-Meleon properly recognizes the JRE.

Internationalization/Multi-Language Support

  • Localisation packages will be available in the K-Meleon Resource area.

Uninstalling

    1. Go to Settings - Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs.
    2. Select K-Meleon1.0 (remove only).
    3. Click on the Add/Remove or Change/Remove button.
    4. Click on the Uninstall button.
    5. Click on the Finish button to close out the uninstall program when it is completed.

Known Issues/Problems

General

  • When viewing web page source from dynamically generated pages, the current source may not match the displayed page.
  • The content of the browser may not be resized properly when moving a windows explorer task bar.
  • When you edit your web search preferences, the menu will not reflect your changes before a restart.
  • The URL bar content is not updated if you go back/previous just after having edited it.

Browser Display

  • Colors do not display properly when monitor resolution is set to 256 colors since Mozilla/Gecko does not provide proper support for 256 colors. See Mozilla Bug #88560.
  • A site not displaying properly is normally caused by one of two issues:
    1. The site is not compliant with current HTML standards.
    2. The display problem is due to a Mozilla/Gecko bug.

Mouse wheel scrolling/Multiple mouse buttons

  • The Mouse Gesture support offered by the new plugin is very limited. Gestures are disabled by default, you can enable them in the plugins section of the preference panel. Users in need of more advanced gestures are advised to use a third-party program, such as StrokeIt.
  • Mouse wheel scrolling does not work with all drivers. If you have problems, try updating your driver or disabling any "helper" programs that your mouse uses.
  • K-Meleon may not recognize secondary control buttons on mice with multiple buttons. If your mouse software permits programming, you may want to try binding those buttons to the respective keyboard commands that K-Meleon uses for navigation.

Third party Plugins

  • Most Mozilla-compatible plugins work with K-Meleon. If you already have Mozilla-compatible plugins installed, K-Meleon will detect and use a number of these plugins. You can download Mozilla/Netscape-compatible plugins from Mozilla here: https://addons.update.mozilla.org/plugins/
  • The most current versions of Flash Player and Shockwave Player support K-Meleon 1.0. To check to see if these are installed properly, visit Shockwave's test site. When installing either program if you are asked for the location of the plugins directory, use the following location: \Program Files\K-Meleon\plugins

Proxies

  • K-Meleon can be configured to work properly with proxies such as Junkbuster that do not support the most recent HTTP specification. By default, K-Meleon tries to use HTTP 1.1. To use K-Meleon with a proxy that only supports HTTP 1.0, change the HTTP version under Edit - Preferences - General.
Source: K-Meleon



Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Know about PHP and Opensource

PHP is stand for Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.If you are new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, try the introductory tutorial. After that, check out the online manual, and the example archive sites and some of the other resources available in the links section.



PHP provides open source for users to make their own site.

There are so many open sources available like Drupal, Jumala, OsCommerce, X-Cart,etc. This all are free lancing sources. The user simply down load these source setup them and use them.
The open sources are such a good for community site, ecommerce site etc. We can use these all open sources to make such sites. The main benifite is that these open sources are free lancing and they provide basic platform for developer. The developer has to now just embed these open sources.
There are some downloads provided below:

Learn your self php

Know about Drupal

Now adays there are some frameworks are available for PHP. And those are as listed below.

Cakephp

Symphony

Smarty

Saturday, July 21, 2007

The PHP.net Google Summer of Code

Some Good News for PHP Community Are As Follow:


The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Seven students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer:

  • Mentored by Michael Wallner, Hannes Magnusson will work on LiveDocs, which is a "tool to display DocBook XML files in a web browser on the fly, without the need of building all HTML target files first". This project will be of great value to the PHP Documentation Team.
  • The PHP Interpreter uses reference counting to keep track of which objects are no longer referenced and thus can be destroyed. A major weakness in the current implementation is that it cannot detect reference cycles, that is objects that reference each other in a circular graph structure which is not referenced itself from outside the circle. Mentored by Derick Rethans, David Wang will implement a new reference counting algorithm that will alleviate this problem.
  • Xdebug provides a range of useful functionality for PHP developers, including detailed error information, code coverage and profiling support, and support for remote debugging using the GDB and DBGp protocols. Mentored by Xdebug's creator, Derick Rethans, Adam Harvey will develop a cross-platform GUI application that implements the DBGp protocol and allows PHP applications to be debugged using Xdebug in a development environment agnostic fashion.
  • Mentored by Lukas Smith, Konsta Vesterinen will work on the object-relational mapper Doctrine.
  • Mutation Testing, or Automated Error Seeding, is an approach where the testing tool makes some change to the tested code, runs the tests, and if the tests pass displays a message saying what it changed. This approach is different than code coverage analysis, because it can find code that is executed by the running of tests but not actually tested. Mentored by Sebastian Bergmann, Mike Lewis will implement Mutation Testing for PHPUnit.
  • Mentored by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, Igor Feghali will add support for foreign keys to MDB2_Schema, a package that "enables users to maintain RDBMS independant schema files in XML that can be used to create, alter and drop database entities and insert data into a database".
  • Mentored by David Coallier, Nicolas Bérard-Nault will refactor the internals of Jaws, a Framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites, for PHP 6.
Source: php

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Nominate Drupal for the 2007 Open Source CMS Award!

For the second year in a row, UK publisher Packt is running the Open Source Content Management System Award and is accepting nominations until August 31, 2007.

The 2006 Open Source CMS Award was designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an open source Content Management System (CMS) selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. This year's Awards are intended to support and give more exposure to a broader range of open source Content Management Systems, and will have winners in several different categories:

Last year, Drupal placed second in this award, behind our friends at Joomla!. Can we pull ahead this year? Only your nominations will tell. :)

Source: Drupal

Drupal 7 and PHP 5.2

Go PHP 5!Drupal has long prided itself for staying ahead of the curve technologically. In order to be able to write the best quality Drupal software, Drupal developers need the best programming tools available. Today, the best PHP available is PHP 5.

PHP 5 has been deployed and tested in production environments for three years. Unfortunately, web hosts have been slow to adopt PHP 5, which has made it difficult for Drupal and many other PHP projects to fully embrace PHP 5's features.

Now a growing consortium of PHP projects have joined together and push for wider PHP 5 adoption. By all embracing PHP 5 together, the projects involved in the GoPHP 5 effort are sending a message to web hosts that it is time to embrace PHP's future.

Drupal is now part of that movement.

Source: Drupal 7

Friday, July 13, 2007

Object oriented programming (OOP) without classes…!!!

Nowadays, object oriented programming (OOP) is quickly taking place over the traditional procedure oriented programming (POP). Success of the modern programming languages like C# and Java is obviously because of OOPs Power.

As all the OOP languages use CLASS or similar data structures for Object Oriented Programming, we have considered that without a “CLASS”, OOP is not possible.

With the same idea in my mind, I’d briefly gone through the code base of “Drupal” - One of the most popular open source content management system and framework built with PHP language. I often read and heard many praise about the power of Drupal, but after the first look at the code base, I amazed that Drupal doesn’t use a single Class in it’s code base! Whole Drupal code base is based on just functions. As PHP, with which programming language Drupal itself is built, is also implementing many powerful OPP features, I could not understand why Drupal is not using these features!

As I’d not seen the keyword ‘class’ in Drupal code base, I evaluated Drupal as non-OOP as many programmers do. And that was my mistake! Even though, Drupal doesn’t contain any class like data structure, it is still Object Oriented. I realized this fact after details study of Drupal.

Actually, the OOP concept is not based on uses of data structures like CLASS. It is based on the fundamentals of features like Objects, Abstraction, Encapsulation, Polymorphism, Inheritance etc. If these fundamental features are included in programming then it can be considered in OOP.

Drupal covers all these features without classes. I also realized that the power of Drupal is hardly depends on this programming structure only. The way, how the hook system has been implemented in Drupal would never been possible with the use of Classes.


See more details about how Drupal implements Object Oriented Programming (OOP) without using Classes,

visit: http://api.drupal.org/api/HEAD/file/developer/topics/oop.html

A Good Themes For drupal

Abac

Theme for Drupal 5.x., CSS-based (tableless), two column layout, big place for logo (banner) 215x165px, the footer ("contacts") is placed under title.

Author: garamond.

VersionDateLinks
5.x-1.42007-Mar-19

Aberdeen

A fresh design that balances simplicity, soft, neutral background colors, plenty of whitespace and big nice typography.

List of features

•Standards-compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS (No CSS hacks).
•Liquid CSS layout (tableless) - the whole layout increases or decreases proportionally as dimensions are specified in ems. Try changing the font size to see this working.
•Supports one, two and three columns.
••Cross-browser compatible. Works fine in Firefox 2.0 and IE 6.
•Cute icons (all GPL or created by myself).
•Coded with SEO in mind, the order of the columns are 2dn, 3rd and 1st - usually the 1st is intended for navigation, the other two for content, Google likes that.
•Slinding doors tabs for primary links that blend with main content area.

VersionDateLinks
5.x-1.72007-Mar-12
Find out more · Bugs and feature requests

Source: Themes

Core Module

The pages below give help for the modules that come with Drupal. When you install Drupal, these modules are automatically installed. To make use of a module, first make sure it's enabled at administer >> site building >> modules. (Some modules automatically are.) Then set the right permissions for it at administer >> user management >> access control.

You can further extend the features of Drupal by using "contributed modules." A list of help pages for contributed modules is available at the contributed modules page.

If you would like to add a module help page, follow the authoring guidelines. The site maintainers can create and update pages for you.


Source: Core Module For Drupal

About Drupal

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

  • Community web portals
  • Discussion sites
  • Corporate web sites
  • Intranet applications
  • Personal web sites or blogs
  • Aficionado sites
  • E-commerce applications
  • Resource directories
  • Social Networking sites

Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web installer! The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

  • Content Management Systems
  • Blogs
  • Collaborative authoring environments
  • Forums
  • Peer-to-peer networking
  • Newsletters
  • Podcasting
  • Picture galleries
  • File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use. If you like what Drupal promises for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your specific needs.

Source: Aout Drupal

Drupal open source

Drupal 5.1 and 4.7.6 released

Heine - January 29, 2007 - 19:15

Drupal 4.7.6 and 5.1 are available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as a security vulnerability.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

Source: http://drupal.org/

Monday, June 18, 2007

Advantage API Features

The Advantage API solution, which is based on the Advantage product line’s core
MapQuest technology platform, offers the following features:
• Mapping. Display, interact with, and customize high-quality maps. Add
custom icons, annotate maps with drawings, or customize map styles.
Display different levels of detail or icons at different map scales.
• Geocoding. Assign latitude/longitude coordinates to a street address, a postal
code, a city, a state, or location. Receive detailed information about each
match to decide how to best process ambiguous or low confidence matches.
• Driving directions (routing). Generate visual and/or textual navigation
directions from one location to another with optional intermediate
destinations. Select the fastest route, the shortest route, or other route
options. Generate an “optimized” multi-destination route to reorder
intermediate destinations into the fastest route between origin and
destination.
• Proximity searching. Search for the closest locations within a set radius, a
rectangular or defined polygonal area, or along a drive route. Use dynamic
database queries to search for specific criteria about that location. API clients
can upload and manage locations using a set of tools hosted by MapQuest.
• Proximity by Drive Time. You can use search APIs in conjunction with
routing APIs to search for all locations within a certain proximity to an origin
point. You may search by either driving distance or driving time. Proximity
searching by drive distance or time can be particularly useful when searching
near bodies of water or mountains, where straight-line distance does not
accurately reflect drive time.
• Points of Interest (POIs). Search your own custom location databases
containing location information for stores, restaurants, hotels, etc., or license
large Points of Interest databases and gain access to location information
concerning local landmarks or businesses.
• Automatic data selection. Use MapQuest’s proprietary data selection
technology to provide the best data for each request, dynamically choosing
among multiple data sets from the world’s leading data providers.
• Voice-recognition integration capability. Create a voice interface for location
searching using MapQuest’s valued partnership with NetByTel, the leading
provider of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems.
• Technical support. Access technical support using comprehensive online
documentation, or obtain phone and e-mail support from dedicated business
account managers and knowledgeable 24/7 technical support personnel.
• Reporting. Generate various transaction reports using an online interface.
Use custom geographic area reports or other reports to track trends and
provide the basis for vital business decisions.