Yesterday I was at the Google Geo Developer day in Amsterdam. I think it’s the second time Google organizes such an event. The first time was last year preceding the Oreilly’s Where 2.0 conference in the US (btw. why isn’t there such an event in Europe?).
The program looked interesting and I was looking forward meeting other Google Maps developers.
The day started with some keynotes.
This morning there’s some great news about the Google Maps API:
The Google Maps API Team is excited to announce our new open source project, the GMaps Utility Library. This project will be hosted on code.google.com and will let the Google engineers for the Maps API work hand-in-hand with the many great developers in the Maps API community. Together, we can extend the core Maps API and ensure that every developer need is met.
There are a few reasons why I think this is great news:
On the Google Blog there’s an official announcement of the Plus Box feature. This feature allows extra information to be shown next to individual search results. The feature isn’t completely new, as several bloggers, including Google’s own Matt Cutts have written about it (see search engine land’s post with links to a few of them).
There are two types of Plus Box result: Stock information and maps. I don’t find stock information that interesting, but I love the maps Plus Box. If you search for a business and Google knows its address, there will be a map shown next to the search result with a marker where the address is.
At this moment most (all?) of the results are from the US. You can search for restaurants in New York and you’ll see a few examples (at the bottom of the first page). Sadly I haven’t found any business with a Map Plus Box in The Netherlands (or elsewhere in Europe). The only result with a maps Plus Box you’ll get when searching for restaurants in Amsterdam is Amsterdam Restaurant in New York 
The Google Blog says they are working hard to increase the availability and I hope they will add availability of non-US businesses soon.
I’m not sure a lot of people now how they can add their business information to Google so it’ll show up in the Plus Box or in a Google Maps search. You can add your own information by using the Local Business Center. See more information at the Webmaster Help Center.
In The Netherlands most companies are registered in the Chamber of Commerce register (KvK) and this information automatically shows up in a Google Maps search. At the Local Business Center you can change and add your information (images, description, categories, etc). Before these changes will show up in the search results you have to enter a PIN you’ll get by snail mail sent to your business address.
In the Local Business Center you can also see some kind of statistics, I don’t know what kind of stats it’ll show, because I haven’t received the PIN yet. I’ve changed my information on March 8.
According to the Google Blog there will be more Plus Boxes in the future. One has already been spotted, the Video Plus Box, which shows a video in the Plus Box. I’m curious whether this will only show Youtube and Google Video results, or also videos of Google’s competitors?
After looking into Cartographer and YM4R I started searching for other geo tools for Ruby.
I found several and started creating a list. My idea was to make a comparison between the features of the different plugins. But I soon found out James Stewart did this already in his Comparing rails geo-plugins post. He moved the information to a wiki, on which the most recent information about the different Geo plugins can be found. On this page you’ll also find some great reviews of the different plugins.
I started looking into GeoKit, acts_as_geocodable and actsaslocateable. The last one isn’t suitable for my application, because it can only deal with US addresses. That’s also true for some of the geocoding services the other two support. The only one1 with support for Dutch addresses is the Google geocoding service, so sadly no fall back mechanism for Dutch addresses when one geocoding service isn’t available.
There are a few differences between the remaining two plugins.
acts_as_geocodable makes use of a gem called Graticule. This gem takes care of the actual geocoding, communicating with external services, etc. The acts_as_geocodable plugin takes care of the Rails specific stuff (extra find methods, etc).
GeoKit has all the functionality in the plugin, but Bill Eisenhauer, one of the authors, said “there’s no reason why this needs to be packaged entirely as a plugin”. So maybe this will change one day.
Another important difference is the way the two plugins store the geocoded information. GeoKit can handle existing models with longitude and latitude columns. You can specify the names of the columns with the column_name parameters (the defaults are ‘lat’ and ‘lng’).
The acts_as_geocodable plugin creates two new tables. The first is called geocodes and stores the longitude and latitude for a given address. The second table links the geocodes into your model in a polymorphic way.
Both plugins als have a feature the other plugin doesn’t have (as far as I can tell).
acts_as_geocodable can update the address fields with the data returned from the geocoding service, just add acts_as_geocodable :normalize_address => true to your model.
GeoKit has the ability to look up a location based on the user’s IP-address.
Which of the two is better? I don’t know. They almost have the same feature set, GeoKit does IP-based location lookups, while acts_as_geocodable separates its functionality between the plugin and the gem and has the ability to normalise addresses.
I think it’s a matter of taste, which one to choose. Or is there any difference in performance? I guess I have to test this.
For now, I think I’ll start with GeoKit for my application. I really like the ability to keep my own models with the longitudes and latitudes.
1 Maybe someday I’ll write a post about addresses and zip codes in The Netherlands and why the aren’t available for free.
Previous post I mentioned a new book about Google Maps and Rails: Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax.
I haven’t read the book, but I’ve download chapter 7 and I think it’s an awesome book. A recommendation for everybody who’s building Google Maps Mashups with Rails.
You can even get it for free. There’s a contest where you can win a copy of the book, they are giving away 3 free copies. They call it a ‘contest’, but all you have to do is leave your name and email address. You have to hurry, because they’ll randomly draw three entries on March 15th, 2007 (deadline is midnight March 14th EDT).
If you haven’t won a copy on the 15th, you could always order a hard-copy (also available as an ebook)
All the examples of the book can be viewed online and the sourcecode can be downloaded.
For a new project I’m working on, I will make extensive use of Google Maps. At this moment I’m doing some research to find out what the best practices are to use Google Maps in Rails applications. I also want to find out what tools there are.
The first projects I ran into are the tools which simplify the creation of a map: Cartographer and YM4R. These two projects give the user a Ruby based approach for building maps. According to Andre Lewis in his Google Talk about Ruby and Google Maps you’ll run into the limitations of these projects very soon if you’re building complex applications. Andre is one of the writers of the new book about Google Maps and Rails, called “Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional”.
These tools can be very useful if you want to build a Google Maps application fast or if you don’t want to make your hands dirty on the Javascript (or maybe you just don’t have the knowledge).
The application I’m building will be rather complex and I don’t mind programming in Javascript. So I’m not going to make use of this kind of tools. The next category of tools you can use in building maps, are the geocoding tools. These will be the subject of a future post.
B.t.w. It looks like the cartographer project is dead, so if you want to use this way of building maps, there’s only one solution left, YM4R.
Through this article at the geonames blog I found the ‘API Feature Requests’ page.
This page lists feature requests for the Google Maps API. If you like a feature and it’s already listed, you can write your name next to it to. If it’s not listed you can append it to the list.
There are a few very interesting feature requests.
‘Compatibility with other map APIs’. This is the feature request the article at the Geonames weblog talks about. Indeed it would be very nice if there’s a common API which is shared between all the Map vendors. There can be different reasons why you want to switch between different maps, eg the license changes, the area your application is about is covered better in a different map, etc. One problem I can think of with this approach is the that the feature set is not the same for every Map. So this common API can only cover the basics, but maybe that’s enough?
If you want a common API right away you have to take a look at projects like myMap, or Mapstraction. These projects are adding an extra layer on top of the major Map APIs from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. You could also use the Open Layers API which also supports the APIs of these vendors.
Another nice feature request is ‘Ability to restrict geocoder to a particular region, country’. If this would be possible and your application is about a specific region you even could create an auto completion search on addresses.
If you’re using the Google Maps API a lot, take a look at the list and add your name or feature request to it.
Yesterday I got a phone call from Google. The lady on the phone said Google is organizing a Geo developer day in Amsterdam somewhere in march. She asked me to whom she could address the invitation.
After the call I realized I didn’t ask for the precise date, so I guess I have to wait for the invitation. I can’t find any information about this developers day on the web.
The lady said she got my phone number from this website. Probably the Stemlocaties Amsterdam page (Google Maps mashup with all vote locations for the Dutch General Elections) got their attention somehow
update 1: Today (March 1) I got the invitation, so now I know the date . The program looks very interesting, so Google count me in!
update 2: Read my report about the GeoDay
