Geocoding on Rails

Your Map to Geocoding Rails Applications

If you’ve worked on a web application in the past decade, there’s a good chance you’ve written mapping or geocoding functionality. We’ve worked on numerous Rails applications that geocode certain pieces of data; each time, we had to remind ourselves which Ruby gems to use for searching, how to retrieve coordinate information from the browser, and the correct way to write tests for the behavior we wanted to add.

This 60 page book solves these problems by presenting a comprehensive, up-to-date guide to building mapping applications with Ruby on Rails.

Download a free sample chapter.

Geocoding on Rails covers the following topics:

• Which gems to use based on application requirements
  
• How to build out a Rails application which geocodes data
  
• How to use the W3C Geolocation and Google Geocoding APIs to reverse-geocode at a browser level
  
• How to speed up responses with caching
  
• How to test virtually every aspect of the app as it’s built

Includes the source code of a Rails app with easy to read code and high performing geospatial queries

The book includes a fully functional Rails application written in Rails 4 and Ruby 2 with a full test suite of RSpec acceptance tests (using Capybara), unit tests, and CoffeeScript unit tests using Konacha. Also included is a dataset with almost 11,000 Starbucks locations to get you started.

Geocoding on Rails is written by Josh Clayton, Laila Winner, and thoughtbot.