Kiva World
Kiva World is a project that arose out of a recent graduate course I took in dynamic web development and while it is it is not the first one of its type it is the version that I wrote and as such I do have a bit of an attachment to it. This particular application was written using a combination of PHP and JavaScript to provide the dynamic interaction in the user’s browser and leans heavily upon the Google Maps API along with the API exposed by Kiva.
One of the interesting things about the version that I wrote, that does not appear to have been implemented by the other version as of the time of this writing, is the ability to see lender data as well as lendee data. This actually presented an interesting challenge due to the fact that Kiva exposes their data with extremly accurate geocoding for the lendees, but lenders are able to free text their location. As such aggreigating the lenders is exteremly hard and coupled with anonomyous lenders, I actually filter out a lot of them from the displayed results.
For those of you that are not familar with Kiva they are a charitable service that provides microloans to those living in poverty with the purpose of helping them develop their own business. Since it is a charitable service, lenders do not get any interest, but if the loan is successfully repaid, they can get their money back.