Loose Change / GeoCouch Demo

This is a demonstration application to show you how to get started using Loose Change and GeoCouch to managed location-aware data.

Getting Started

1. Install GeoCouch (instructions available via github).

2. Clone this repository.

3. Have Ruby 1.9 and bundler installed on your system, and run bundle install from the project root.

4. Run rake db:seeds from the project root, which will copy the lake data from lakes.csv into CouchDB (see db/seeds.rb to see how this happens). The lakes data is via the USGS.

5. Run rails server and check it out!

How It Works

The Model

The Lake model, in app/models/lake.rb, is a simple LooseChange model with two normal properties (name and state) and a spatial point property loc, which is set as a [lat,lng] array.

The Controller

By declaring the geo_point property, LooseChange gives us a by_bounding_box method that allows us to find all documents whose position is within the bounding box defined by two points (SW and NE corners, respectively). We find those documents and return them as JSON to the UI.

The Front End

Most of the work here is done in JavaScript, in public/javascripts/application.js. On document ready, we try the HTML5 geolocation API (see a good demo at html5demos.com) to get the user's location, or fall back on a predefined point near the middle of the US. Once we have the center position, we initialize the map (see documentation for the Google Maps API). When the map is drawn, and any time the map is redrawn, we call a function retrieveLakes which makes an AJAX call to the application to retrieve a JSON array of lakes within the current bounds. For each lake, we generate a marker with its name and state and place it on the map. On re-draws, v3 of the Google Maps API requires you to manually clear the markers from the map.