Beginning Google Maps Applications

Andre Lewis has been hard at work writing our new sister book Beginning Google Maps with RAILS and Ajax. It’s due back from the printers in about a week, so on the eve of its release he has also released GeoKit for Rails along with Bill Eisenhauer. Bill also has a few examples on his site. Check them out.

From the site:

Geokit is a Rails plugin for building location-based apps. It provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation in one cohesive package. If you have any tables with latitude/longitude columns in your database, or if you every wanted to easily query for “all the stores within a 50 mile radius,” then GeoKit is for you.
What can GeoKit do for you?

• Distance calculations between two points on the earth. Calculate the distance in miles or KM, with all the trigonometry abstracted away by GeoKit.
• ActiveRecord distance-based finders. For example, you can find all the points in your database within a 50-mile radius.
• Geocoding from multiple providers. It currently supports Google, Yahoo, Geocoder.us, and Geocoder.ca geocoders, and it provides a uniform response structure from all of them. It also provides a fail-over mechanism, in case your input fails to geocode in one service.
• IP-based location lookup utilizing hostip.info. Provide an IP address, and get city name and latitude/longitude in return.
• A before_filter helper to geocode the user’s location based on IP address, and retain the location in a cookie.

If this is interesting to you consider helping us get the word out for Andre and Bill by digging the announcement for them.

Keep an eye out for a chance to win a copy of his new book in the next few days and be the first in your local RUG to get it!