Provide GeoNames city db in API

[jace]

Addresses are a common feature on HasGeek sites. They appear on hasjob (city only), geekup, hacknight and eventframe.

Filtering by city is a frequently requested feature. It's currently text-only because the city is stored as a string. We don't have a database of city names.

The GeoNames project provides free databases of cities around the world, with a consistent place id. This place id replaces City, State and Country in our fields.

Hascore should provide a copy of the GeoNames city db that other projects can use to provide an autocomplete field for city name. From their documentation, the cities1000.zip dump seems appropriate for our needs.

Instructions for importing to PostgreSQL.

[kracekumar]

How about having this in coaster ?Whenever the project needs places, we can create schema + data ?

[jace]

Coaster contains code patterns, not data. Baseframe has some data such as the country list, but that data doesn't quite belong there either. We don't have a sensible place to store frequently reused data. We need:

1. One code module in which to place reusable data, from where we can import it, and
2. One web service from which to serve reusable data, so that users can benefit from browser caching.

The geonames db shouldn't be in code at all because it changes often. It comes under use case 2, a shared webservice, and hence hascore.

[kracekumar]

Makes sense.

[kracekumar]

Will this architecture affect mobile user experience ?

[jace]

It shouldn't be any different from the web experience.

[jace]

Implemented in bc6736e.