Geonames Gem
Posted by Shady Sat, 03 May 2008 03:37:34 GMT
The geonames ruby gem is a really useful piece of software that makes it super easy to query the geonames web services. I just used it in a distributed systems project (more on that later) and I found it to be great. Today, however, in a fit of "oh-sweetjesus-the-server-is-down-before-my-demo" panic, I ended up purchasing some credits for the commercial geonames service, only to find that the geonames gem doesn't actually have the facility to use the paid service. So I added the functionality myself. It was actually pretty simple (the it only required changes to two files) and I think it could be used by more people then just myself who have a paid geonames account.
The two patches are attached to this article, and also posted on the issues page for the gem at google code.
I'm also working on adding support for the countryInfo webservice in the gem.
Stay tuned.