College Park Crime Reports

College Park Crime Reports is a Ruby on Rails application that manages data on reports of crimes committed against students, including location information. The location information is then displayed on maps using Google's Map API. As in a typical Rails application, Rails' Active Record implementation maps classes and objects to tables and records in a relational database, and Rails MVC architecture keeps presentation in views and interactive features in controllers.

View current version: v0.4 (November 30, 2006)

Introduction

About a month ago, we started getting an alarming number of "Crime Alert" emails from campus and county police. Almost everyday there was a report of students being mugged or assaulted on campus or in the town of College Park. I knew that people had built applications for tracking crime using Google's maps API to put interactive maps right on the page. I was curious to try this out myself, and I was eager to build a Rails application, having spent the last two months boning up on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

What follows is a narrative log of the steps I have taken so far to set up the application. I won't promise to keep this up to date as I make enhancements. I also want to say that I'm sure I'm reinventing someone's wheel, or water-skis at least, and by the time you read this, someone will likely have built a turnkey solution for setting something like this up with Ruby gems, rake scripts, helpers, templates, etc. But I want to build at least the basic structure from scratch so I know how to do it.

If you have questions or suggestions, I welcome them at mh (at) michaelharrison (dot) ws. (Please put the phrase "Crime Report" in your subject, or my spam filters will likely zap your message!) Alternatively, you may post comments to my blog entry on this app.