Graphical METAR
Skills
Adobe Flash, including ActionScript, regular expressions, and web services
Summary
One of the members-only features of Airtraveler.com (now defunct), Graphical METAR connects to an in-house web service to retrieve and interpret Meteorological Aviation Report (METAR) data — weather information for pilots — to provide a user-friendly visual representation. The compass shows wind direction and speed, the thermometer shows temperature, icons illustrate various conditions, and the app’s background supplies a quick overview, like looking out a window.
The METAR data standard can extremely complicated. For example, the phrase KORF 250151Z 22009KT 10SM OVC080 00/M12 A2995 RMK AO2 SLP143 T00001117 contains meaningful weather information! Drawing this information out was quite an effort.
In addition to the Flash work, I wrote the regular expression patterns to accomplish this goal, which I passed along to the .NET web services programmer. These were easily my most sophisticated regular expressions to date.
