6.8. Suggested Exercises
This is now my fifth book, and each one was an Apress "practical" book, which means I've written a whole lot of mini-applications over the past few years! I refer back to them when I have questions or need to remember how to do something. This application, however, is the first that I've found myself using on a pretty regular basis! I find it to be genuinely useful in my day-to-day life.
That being said, I think there are some things that could be added to make it even more useful, and I think they would be good learning exercises for you to undertake as well. So here are a few ideas:
Add a link to the Yahoo! page with the details for the selected business. Look through the documentation for the local search service and You'll find that such a link is part of the data returned. This will enable you to see things like user ratings and reviews.
Add a Google search pane to the Accordion. This will enable you to see a list of search hits for a given business as provided by Google. I say Google for two reasons: first, as for most of the planet, it is my search engine of choice because I find the results are generally better than other engines, and second, I want to prove that there's no inherent limitation on mashing up services from two sources. Google provides web APIs just like Yahoo! does, and while you could use Yahoo!'s web search services it might be fun to play with Google a little too.
Store the last, say, three searches in the Gears database and provide a way to quickly pull them up. Store the search results, not just the search criteria. No sense pinging Yahoo!'s servers if you can avoid it!
If you select an item in the search results Grid, you can then use the arrow keys to move up and down, but nothing changes on the right. It probably should, so how about you fix that?
Add the ability to get directions to a selected business. You may have to look around for a service that gives you this capability; I'd check into what else Yahoo! offers first, and then perhaps Google's web API offerings.
Use a slider in place of the zoom buttons on the Map pane. I wrote a version of this application for my last book on Dojo, and That's exactly what I did there. I ran into some issues with making it work with Ext JS, so time being tight I had to drop back and punt, and so using buttons was the answer. However, as an exercise, and heck, even if you can't make it work 100 percent, switching to a slider is a good exercise. The slider itself works just fine, but there were some relatively minor rendering issues I ran into that, while you could live with them as a result of an exercise like this, you wouldn't want to ship a book with them!