Hello Programmers,

I was looking for some advice in regards to a software business idea I have. Unfortunately for me I am the business side of things and not the computer programming side. Basically my business colleagues (myself included) have been looking to add a few programmers to our business team. Truth be told, we do not know exactly what we should be looking for in a programmer, we really only know what we want the program to do. So I have to come to a forum like this to get some answers from people with the expertise in this field. I was hoping someone could give me the answers or some direction to the following questions:

The software would focus on mapping (get from point A to point B while traversing objects in between.)
1.) Is there a preferential programming language for mapping?
2.) Is there open source code on the internet that I can be directed to?

The program could be used potentially world wide, so there is a need for multiple languages
3.) For multi-language capabilities is there a preferential software language?

The program would be displayed in 3-D graphics
4.) Is there a potential programming language that is best for graphics?

Any answers or direction to any of these questions would be a great help and would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

The appropriate language tends to depend on the programmers you have working for you. There are bindings for opengl in many languages, so any are capable of cross platform function. If you require cross platform functionality I'd suggest using GTK+ for your widgets. You can quite easily get it working with opengl for your 3d graphics and it has (as a whole) good internationalization support. As for mapping and route finding around obstacles this is almost certainly an extremely active research topic, but there are numerous simple methods depending on the representation of the world and the things that need to be factored in. Will the world be represented as a height map with gradient restrictions or costs, as a graph, will the graph be weighted, a digraph? All of these are important questions as is the required performance of the system and the size of the environment one must map/navigate. Your choice of method might also be restricted by the skills of your programmer in implementing any potential scheme. If you look up Dijkstra's algorithm you'll find an example of a typical graph route finding scheme.

Dan