Tell me more ×
Programmers Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional programmers interested in conceptual questions about software development. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite
1

Design application to send messages by marking circle on the map where you want to send message ?

This is a question that was asked of me by an interviewer.

Given a map of the world, Select the country you want to send message to by marking the area with a circle then send the message to all the people in that area.

Visual Link to the Question : Design this application

The approach that I told him:

Firstly build whole person's data (contacts , place information and all). Then where you mark on the map, just build a cluster of that country using Hadoop and fire the message to all the person's contact comes in that cluster.

please help me to better understand this problem, and if there is a better approach to the problem (all back-end and front-end).

share|improve this question
Could it be that the interviewer wanted to know, how you would identify if a person is in that circle or not? – scarfridge Sep 28 '12 at 10:19
He just want to discuss on that topic, only to check the knowledge of interviewee in that topic. – devsda Sep 28 '12 at 11:17

closed as not a real question by tdammers, Steven A. Lowe, Dynamic, Mark Trapp, Walter Oct 1 '12 at 12:27

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

From the looks of that video demo this sounds like all they are asking is how you can find everyone within a certain distance on a map. That requires that you calculate the Great Circle Distance between the selected the point and the location of each person. Databases with GIS support may do this out of the box.

share|improve this answer
In this application, there is one problem, all computations is performed in the backend, how we give the whole result from server to client very efficiently, because customer only use this application when it respond in fracttions of seconds – devsda Sep 29 '12 at 4:47
1  
Dont make the customer wait for the messages to be sent. Queue the whole process. – GrandmasterB Sep 29 '12 at 6:04
but the processing is dynamic, means it depends upon the query fired by the user. So, how it is possible to make a queue? – devsda Sep 29 '12 at 7:06

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.