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Comments by Alex Reisner

Alex Reisner on #273 Geocoder 2011-07-09 08:58:08

Check out MySQL spatial extensions and PostGIS.

Alex Reisner on #273 Geocoder 2011-07-08 08:28:08

In general I think of single-precision floats as being precise to approximately a city block. Double-precision floats should be accurate to within inches.

Calculations with decimals are slower so I don't recommend them unless you need some really extreme precision (in which case you should probably be using a proper geospatial datastore).

Alex Reisner on #273 Geocoder 2011-07-05 08:29:08

Geocoder is lighter, easier to use, and has features missing from GeoKit like built-in result caching. It's also designed to be compatible with more storage engines (like MongoDB) and environments (JRuby, Rack, SQLite, etc).

GeoKit has been around longer but Geocoder is also production quality.

Alex Reisner on #273 Geocoder 2011-07-05 08:17:08

Geocoder currently supports Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex and Geocoder.ca APIs for street address geocoding. Geocoder.ca is free but only provides data for the US and Canada. Easy enough to configure:

          ruby
        
Geocoder::Configuration.lookup = :geocoder_ca

The Geocoder README has a table comparing the features of the various APIs.