Ages ago, I was working on a silly little app that was going to draw a radar screen filled with words found on tenbyten.org.

The back end was done a long time ago. I was grabbing a word list once an hour - keeping track of the words in a database - and also calculating coordinates for words based on their current ranking at tenbyten. I also maintained a history of words and their location... so that I could show the movement of words over time.

The problem was I didn't have the time to develop a nice front end for this radar application. I considered building a Flash front end... but I'm not a flash developer so the process was too time consuming.

Well recently both the SAJAX toolkit and dynAPI caught my attention. Both are tools that I wouldn't mind using. But, I have to learn how to use them. Another example of Zen learning at work again...

Wouldn't it be cool if I could build my radar app in pure HTML, CSS and Javascript? I thought so too...

So I've started down the path.

Here is the rough rough rough early framework for what will be this application.

http://www.andremolnar.com/playground/blip/bliptest.php

There is nothing dynamic about this example (besides some mouse over effects) - but the framework is there to add the fancy dynamic aspects as I test them out.

Take a look - tell me what you think.

andre