Less vaporware with Yahoo!'s Rasmus Lerdorf
Picked up from Jeremy Zawodny's blog entry titled "How To Use the Yahoo Geocoding API in PHP.
You know you've got some cool APIs when Rasmus takes the time to write some code against them and then show the world how easy it is: GeoCool!
Web 2.0 and the programmable web that I and others have been talking about for a while has mostly been vapourware so far. There are a few generic components that are useful, but it is somewhat limited what you can do with them. And yes, you may consider this a somewhat biased view, but I think Yahoo!'s new geocoding platform is a huge step in the right direction.
There is of course the fancy new maps.yahoo.com/beta site which is fun, but as far as I am concerned the killer app here is the geocoding platform that drives this. And it is completely accessible for anyone to use. It's also a sane API that anybody can figure out in minutes. Here are a few tips for using this API from PHP 5.
Anyway, so I plugged in the works street address including suburb and the fact that it's located in South Africa, and then I got this little bit back:
Array
(
[precision] => city
[Latitude] => 40.467621
[Longitude] => -124.364594
[City] => CAPETOWN
[State] => CA
[Country] => US
)
Which obviously looked wrong because it gave me the wrong GPS co-oridinates to Cape Town, South Africa.
