Full JS applications

Recently I asked my network for novel ideas for small web applications or sites.

My accountant mentioned that he had a hard time calculating distance travelled for some of his customers. He needs to calculate the specific distance for any trip made in a private car for a refund from the danish IRS.

For each trip made by an employee in one of the companies he used to go to a GeoCoding site like http://www.maps.google.com. Plot in 1 trip with From and To addresses, take the distance and put it into a spreadsheet. And so his days went. He made sure to mention to me that it is a problem for many smaller companies.

Using Google's public GeoCoding services I managed to put together an application run entirely by javascript. It is available at http://www.kennethhn.dk/map.html, it is in danish, until I bother using JS I18N. To give it a go, I included a demo, click 'tryk her for hjælp og demo', in the appeared box click 'klikke her'. Then at the bottom of the page click 'beregn alle'. This will calculate all the inputs with the rate of DKK/KM.

Then to print the results click 'print'.

The tricky thing here is to transfer all the data. What I did was serialize all the data in JSON and put it as a parameter for the print page.

Aside from some escape issues, this transfer works perfectly. It might aswell have been a server request, but this way, you don't need all that performance reducing Serverside rendering..