>Hi,
>
>this isn't a VFP question, but I'm looking for people who have had similar requirements and their reasons for deciding on what to use.
>
>Requirements:
>
>1. Assignment of "assets" (fixed infrastructural sorts of things like buildings) to a specific latitude and longitude and represented on a map with different icons, depending on the type of asset.
>
>2. The country is broken down into regions and regions into districts and the assets assigned to a district (ideally this assignment would be automatic based on the lat & long of the asset and the defined area of the district and region)
>
>3. Assets are being ranked by various criteria and I need to colour code the regions/districts depending on a defined formula taking something like the average ranking of the assets in each region. For example, if we had 10 assets in district A with an average ranking of 5, the district A would be colour coded Green.
>
>I see a Graphical UI where a map of a country can be split up into regions and districts and "assets" and the user can click on a region and drill down (explode or zoom into that region) to see the districts in that region and then drill down into a selected district at which point in time they would then be able to zoom in on a district and see the assets in the area. It would be nice if they could then hover the mouse over a particular region/district/asset and get some summary info displayed about that region/district/area.
>
>4. This is to be a web based UI, (running on an intranet, if that matters). I am still to determine what technologies the company uses currently for their intranet. There is the possibility of needing the system to run on smart phones.
>
>My experience is in VFP (20 years almost!), SQL Server, C#/ASP.NET (1-2 years) and have done some javascript and PHP work. I know VFP is not a good choice here so my short list of possible tools is:
>
>C#/ASP.NET & SQL Server
>
>or maybe javascript or PHP & PostgreSQL
>
>However, I have investigated and done some initial learning on the following:
>
>Ruby, Dabo, Servoy
>
>Is there anything else I should consider? Jquery? HTML5?
>
>All advice and input welcome as I am a blank page!


At my 8-5 employer we do this all the time using ESRI components. We use SQL Server backend, C#, and ASP.NET or Silverlight depending on the client.

ESRI provides absolutely great samples for all of ther tools.

ESRI can be relatively inexpensive to get up and running (it is very scalable, but the higher end gets really expensive).

www.esri.com

Google Maps may be a good start as well.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps.html