Fedex API

Comments

# William said on May 28, 2005 6:25 PM:

Dude I hate to ruin it for you......no I don't let's be honest this will be fun. Denise Gosnell is the same Chick that wrote the book "Beginning Access 2003 VBA". That is one of the books that is like Bible for the type of wanna-be developer I hate and I'm pretty sure you do as well.


The Speech server thing sounds really cool!

# William said on May 28, 2005 8:12 PM:

Listen here Cornbread boy.... you don't need to be so friggin redundant. Alll you had to do is say "Access" and that would have made your point every bit as much as "...wanna-be developer..." Of everyone Andy - I expect a little more out of you because we've known each other this long. Are my "I hate Access" credentials even remotely in question. "I'm pretty sure you do as well." Bah. I'm throwing down the gauntlet Canfield - I hate Access EVEN MORE THAN YOU. And I hate it a lot more, and hated even longer than you. Remember the first day you realized that Access was the tool by which true pure evil perpetuates itself in the physical world? Well, 35 seconds before you had that realization... I had it first.

And, I saw an article in the week's Newsweek claiming that you actually read the Access book because you thought access was cooler than Oracle. They also have a co-worker of your who on the condition of anonymity said "Oh yes, the other day I was at lunch with Andy and he said "VBA is like Jenna Jameson and C++ is like Rosie O'Donnell. I'd trade control, from raw pointers to no-bounds checking on Arrays - for Option Explicit Off and Variant data types any day of the week."

Care to confirm or deny that? I also heard that you prefer the look and feel of Access to Pr0N and that up until recently, you didn't know the difference between a Class and a Macro.

Now apologize for not giving me the proper respect as a Died in the Wool Access Hater ;-)

On a serious note though - have you used the Fedex web service by any chance? I know you are a PIMP at GIS stuff... so far I'm a lamer and haven't branched out past MapPoint, but I'm trying to write a little chunk w/ MapPoint that will look at the Fedex tracking path and show images next to it. Yes, I konw, this is a dumb a33 idea now that I actually hashed it out - if you had 18 stops on the Fedex tracking, 18 maps on one page would not only render slower than cold mollasses - but it would be pretty much worthless - especially when you have a Arrived in Memphis followed by Departed Memphis, Arrived in Greenville -> Left for Destination. But mapping stuff with GPS is definitely slick.

Hope you're having a good weekend buddy - and I gotta run out for a few, but if you'll be up later, would like to get some tech advice from you later if you have a few minutes.

# William said on May 28, 2005 9:16 PM:

Heh :) That was awesome! I figured it would get a rise out of you.

On the Fedex thing I have a contract in the works to do something like that but for a freight company so they can see on a map the route their freight is taking, how long it's taking etc. They want it in Asp though and I'm trying to convince them their costs will be lower if they go with Php on Slackware Linux or Jsp on Solaris 10. As much as I like MSFT, Asp is a dog and Asp.Net while being a significant improvement still isn't as great as I had hopes for it to be. It should have blown Jsp out of the water and it really doesn't which is kind of sad given the time they have put into it.

The Fedex thing would be easy for the US and Canada it would be a bit harder if you were doing the whole world and you wanted to show the actual roads it traveled on as there isn't good road base for many countries in the third world. If you just wanted to do a city to city air route thingy that would be easy too but it would be better to do a by air or by land checkbox on the map and then if it's by land have it map out the route as well. Just do simple three frame map, put your package tracking number form in the left most frame, your map in the middle and your layers form on the right with any key info you want in it. You could do it all for free in Conus using the Tiger street data sets, Php on Apache and use PhpMapscript with UMN's Mapserver as the backend rendering engine. If you were at bare bones nothing you could probably have the whole thing done including the server set up in a month if you just worked on it on and off in the evenings. If you gave dedicated days to it you could have it fully setup and running in a bit over a week. The toughest part would be testing it because you would need a bunch of real tracking numbers to test with. Or does there API come with dummy routes and tracking numbers to test with?

I am building three servers this weekend(Monday) for my use here at the house and one of them will be running Slackware Linux with the needed GIS stuff on it. If everything goes smoothly in the server setup we can maybe throw something together. Does UPS have an API as well so we could both in the same mapping page? The others will be running Solaris 10, and SUSE Linux. They are all for testing against so this might be a good thing to do if I get time.

# William said on May 28, 2005 11:38 PM:

heh good news on the X10 / Speech Server stuff. You're ahead of me a little bit... just got the X10 .Net stuff cranked up this weekend.

North Charleston, SC?? That's like 15 minutes away from me... you should have totally come with her!

Later!
Chris

# TrackBack said on June 13, 2005 1:08 AM:

Fedex APIooeess