[thelist] Web based applications

[Nick Myers]

Wonder if I could ask you guys to delve into your wealth of varied
experience?

My company is about to task me with building web based applications (using
nice NS&IE 4.x compliant code - np) that will display lots of analysis
data/graphs and location maps all within a confined environment.  Now they
already have a desktop application that does this, but they want a web
version that they can sell subscriptions to.  My question is this: do you
guys have any examples of web based applications, such as finance, weather,
sports results etc. that's might involve any of the following:

- A map with points drawn on it, where a user mouses over a given point, and
a pop-up (attached to the cursor) appears with some live data in it.
- A map with transparent overlays that can be switched on/off showing
various transparencies.
- Same as above, but with animation controls to animate (step) through
individually rendered graphics [JPEGS] (without having to use a server-side
program to render all the images into one animation).
- A clickable location map, where a list of available data appears once a
location is clicked, and from there the option to interrogate the data and
return data either in tabular or graph format.
- Graphing with threshold setting/changing ability.

Now my key concern is that although this will effectively be on a web site,
I would like it to behave more like an application (even if it takes some
time to load) as you would expect on your desktop.  I can achieve most of
the above by using layers, and timelines (in dreamweaver) that work with IE
4.x and 5.x, but nothing that works with NS 4.x

I've looked at ArcView and GIS, which seem ideal, but I'm being asked to do
something WITHOUT those tools for now.

I sincerely appreciate any input offered.

Thanks

Nick