Ym4r

There seems to be quite a plethora of Ruby/Rails libraries appearing aiming to simplify handling geography and distances. In some cases these libraries do quite distinct things (zip codes vs. longitude/latitude, map output vs. distance calculations) but they’re frequently lumped together and it’s difficult to tell which will be best to use in your projects. I’ve used several of these projects and have previously blogged about YM4R and acts_as_locateable, but I’m still not sure which I’d pick for new projects. So I thought it would be helpful to try to put together a comparison of which libraries offer what functionality. Here I’ll just offer a quick chart, but I’m hoping to write them up in a bit more detail over the coming days/weeks. If there’s sufficient interest, I’d consider moving this out to a wiki for more general use. ...

When I blogged last month about abstracting mapping with YM4R I commented: What I’ve not yet discovered (and may not be implemented) is a way to automatically center and zoom a map. It would be very nice to be able to add a batch of points to a map and have the plugin automatically work out their mid-point. Maybe I need to work on that a little… What I was missing was the center_zoom_on_bounds_init method. There are various ways to interact with it, but I’ve chosen: ...

When Grand Rapids WiFi–then a PHP application–first implemented google map support all the logic for producing those maps came in the templates. The controller passed the view a list of locations for that page, and it wrote out a series of javascript calls that produced the map. It was a little unreliable and very clunky, but it worked. When I moved the app over to rails, that was one aspect that I didn’t change, and it continued to work. ...