With the core components of our application identified, we can now get started with developing the database. Let's start with creating our locations table.
When developing applications that import data from an external source, you can often take advantage of the structure of the external feed to determine what your own database tables should look like. Provided with the chapter resources at protected/data/ is a file called parks.json that serves as our external data source. Since the data in this feed is consistent, let's take a look at a single item in the feed:
{
"name" : "Cancer Survivors' Garden",
"lat" : "41.884242",
"long" : "-87.617404",
"city" : "Chicago",
"state" : "IL"
}A single element in our data feed is composed of the name of the location, its latitude and longitude coordinates, and the city and state of the location. To make things simple, we can represent each of these attributes as a TEXT attribute in our table. Once we have added...