Chapter 6. Building an Interactive Crime Map

Our first project notably lacked any sort of long term memory. Although we worked around the issues using cookies to simulate long-term storage, we also saw the limitations of these. In this project, we'll build an interactive crime map that allows users to tag locations with details of witnessed or experienced criminal activities. As we want to keep the data for the long term and make it available to many users, we cannot rely on our users' local and temporary storage.

Therefore, the first step to our project will be setting up a MySQL database on our VPS and linking this to a new Flask web application. We'll use the Google Maps API to allow users to view our map and add new markers to it (in which each marker represents a crime).

We'll also have some more advanced user input than in our previous project, allowing users to filter their view of the map and add fairly complex data to the map. Therefore, we'll have...