Download pdf - Planning Your Location Strategy for Rails

Planning Your Location Strategy for Rails

-- C. Goldoni

“The world is a beautiful book, but it’s not much use if you don’t know how to read.”

https://learn.thoughtbot.com/geocoding-on-rails



I want to see places to stay in an interesting neighborhood.




I want to find hotels near public transportation.




How do we go from desired user outcomes to working software?

• Learn the vocabulary

• Know the responsibilities of each part of the tech stack

• Form a strategy

• Code!




Geolocation

n. The process of identifying the geographical location of a person or device by digital means.




Geocoding

v. The process of obtaining geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) from full or partial address information.




Reverse-geocoding

v. The process of obtaining address information from geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude).




Geospatial

adj. Of or relating to the relative position of things on the earth’s surface.








Server-side (Ruby)

Interacts with external geocoding services and queries the database.




Database (SQL)

Persists geocoded data, available for geospatial queries.




Client-side (JavaScript)

Interacts with external geocoding services.




External service

Geocodes address, reverse-geocodes coordinates, draws map.



Know our data

• Are the records already geocoded?

• Do our records have address information?

• How accurate do we need the geographic information to be?




Choose an external geocoding service

• How many requests per day will we be making? Will we get rate limited?

• What are the comparable benefits of free, paid, and open source services?

• What is our budget?




Start with free libraries and datasets

• Google Maps JavaScript API

• Geocoder Ruby gem

• Area Ruby gem

• GeoNames downloadable geographical database

• PostGIS


https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/

https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder

https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder

https://github.com/jgv/area

https://github.com/jgv/area

http://www.geonames.org/




http://postgis.refractions.net/

http://postgis.refractions.net/



Whiteboard our design

• Importing data

• Client-side responsibilities

• Server-side responsibilities




Testing

• Stub requests to external services

• Create a fake





Details in the book

Includes a complete codebase (with tests). Plot points on a map, use HTML5 to get coordinates in the browser, cache external services, index geospatial queries, and more.




Questions?

Laila Winner@[email protected]



https://twitter.com/malandr1na

https://twitter.com/malandr1na

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]