I've been doing web development and design for 8 years. I work mostly with Drupal and related technologies, but I'm always interested in learning new skills.
Productividad México
Productividad México
A query and visualization tool for data on economic competitiveness in Mexican states.
Visit site. The site will soon me migrated to its own domain.
What is it?
It's a query and visualization tool for the results of an analysis on economic competitiveness in Mexican states. It was developed for CIDAC, a non-profit organization that does research on economic development.
There are two main tasks in the tool: comparison by state and comparison by economic area. Comparison by state allows one to see the competitiveness of states for similar economic areas, for example: “How did Mexican states compare in mining in 2004.” Comparison by economic area allows one to compare different economic areas within the same state, to a desired degree of disaggregation, for example: “Compare economic classes within manufacturing in Jalisco in 2004.”
The results of the queries are shown in three different ways: a graph, a table and downloadable CSV (MS Excel compatible) table. The graph is a dispersion diagram that plots each result. The tool frequently generates very large datasets leading to large collections of dots on the screen that could be hard, or even impossible to read. To solve this problem, I coded a custom graph generator with a zoom feature, which can vastly improve the legibility of the display. The graph also has a fullscreen feature and the ability to export the current view (even while zoomed) to JPG.
Please, try it.
What did I do?
I was responsible for making the architecture of and coding both the backend and the client of the tool. I worked closely with the client to design a useful tool and with the designer to integrate the design she made and to make the tool fit the container site.
A little bit of geekspeak
The client was built with XHTML, CSS, Javascript and Actionscript 3. It can be embedded in any page (within the same domain) and it gets all the data using ajax. The server was built from scratch with PHP and MySQL and all the communication between the client and the server is sent in XML.
Since the origin data set for all the queries remains static, there's a caching mechanism that that makes que queries increasingly fast over time. Once a dataset has been served, it's cached so it will never have to be calculated again.
Technologies used:
- Javascript / jQuery
- CSS
- XHTML
- PHP
- MySQL
- XML
- Actionscript 3
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