ArcGIS API, Highcharts, and kickbutt elevation profiles - Teaser

A recent website for a Bay Area parks agency, has some very good-looking elevation profiles. You pick a trail from the list, and an elevation profile appears: this great line chart going up and down to show the elevation as you would walk its length, AND as you mouse over the chart it draws a marker on the map to really give an idea of where you're talking about. Here's a clip from my version of it:

And a live demo courtesy of Github Pages:
http://gregallensworth.github.io/ArcGISElevationProfileCharting/

This article will span a few postings, and will describe step by step how I developed this. But for a spoiler, here's the big punchline: it doesn't use ArcGIS Online application templates, because we weren't able to get the extreme flexibility we needed for our demanding clients. Instead I did it with these parts:

- a basic map written in ArcGIS JS API
- a Geoprocessing call to ESRI's elevation service
- jQuery and the Highcharts charting library


The next few postings will be from the ground up: creating a basic map using the ArcGIS JS API, adding click event handlers and Identify tasks, and ultimately calling the elevation service and rendering a very dynamic chart.