Streaming Big Data For Heatmap Visualization using Storm
A record number of tweets was set during the 2012 Presidential debate. If you wondered how technologically this happened, then Event Stream Processing is your answer. Actually, Twitter open sourced such an implementation called Storm . Pretty impressive piece of technology! So, I wanted to try it out with a "geo" twist. To get started, I recommend that you read " Getting Started with Storm ". Here is the challenge at hand, simulate a stream of aircraft flight track targets, in such that a heatmap is generated based on the density of targets at "near" locations. The topology is very simple in this challenge, a spout reading the targets from an external source (to be defined later) is linked to a bolt that overlays a virtual grid on top of an area of interest. Each emitted target tuple is mapped to a cell in the grid and the cell weight is decreased or increased when the target leaves or enters a cell. Storm is a distributed system, that means that...