Yajl required
I wrote a google geocoder to substitute the current one. The reasons were many. First of all Google has a new V3 Geocoding API which provides json responses (faster than xml ones) and also the old V2 API will be deprecated. The implementation requires Yajl gem as it uses it to parse the json response from Google (I am using the Yajl gem for that and not the regular one because it is faster). Another reason was that using the Geokit gem with ruby 1.9.2 many users complaint for the infamous "incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT". I have tested this implementation and it doesn't throw any errors. BEWARE! I have wrote no tests so far!
I have written this benchmark that makes 200 geocoding requests to Google using the old API (xml) and the new API (json):
Benchmark.bm(7).do |x|
x.report("With Yajl API V3") do
(1..200).each do
Geokit::Geocoders::GoogleGeocoder.geocode("201 Varick Street, New York")
end
end
x.report("With old way") do
(1..200).each do
Geokit::Geocoders::GoogleGeocoder.geocode("201 Varick Street, New York")
end
end
end
user system total real
With Yajl API V3 0.390000 0.160000 0.550000 ( 90.042886)
With old way 10.050000 0.420000 10.470000 (166.538278)
Follow the Google Group for updates and discussion on Geokit: http://groups.google.com/group/geokit
(The MIT License)
Copyright (c) 2007-2009 Andre Lewis and Bill Eisenhauer
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