In this chapter, we made a number of improvements to the DISTAL application, fixing various usability and performance issues. Along the way, we learned about the anti-meridian line and how to deal with country outlines that span it. We saw how to add a zoom feature to our CGI scripts so that the user can accurately click on a desired search point, and we saw the effect that having huge polygons can have on the performance of our system. We then learned how to split those large polygons into smaller overlapping tiles that can be used to display a small portion of the high-resolution shoreline without affecting performance.
We now have a fully functioning version of the DISTAL system. If you wanted to, you could publish the DISTAL system on a public web server, making it available for anyone to use. However, DISTAL is implemented as a series of CGI scripts, which is a very rudimentary way of implementing a web application. In the next chapter, we will look at a web framework called...