Month: February 2012

One of the many cool APIs available through Google Maps is the Street View Image API. This gives you full access to the images taken by the Google vans that photograph streets.

The API is dead simple in the basic form, just a URL:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/streetview?size=WIDTHxHEIGHT&location=LOCATION&sensor=false

(The required “sensor” param tells Google if you are getting the location from a GPS device or similar – probably a privacy thing.)

The images are not necessarily spectacular brochure shots:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/streetview?size=400x400&location=Parliament+Square,+London&sensor=false

but it is a useful API for any app that is displaying places that a user might not have been to before. It can both give them an idea of it’s the kind of place they are looking for and help them find it. Here’s an example, a local keycutters:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/streetview?size=400x400&location=Timpson,+Victoria+Station,+London&sensor=false

Bending back the pins on an IDE hard drive and hoping they don’t snap off …

I’ve been working on a CoffeeScript web app in RailwayJS which is a rails-alike framework for nodejs built on top of Express.

One cool thing about RailwayJS is that you can write most of your code (not views?) in CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript. The generators, etc. will do the right thing if you give them the --coffee switch.

RailwayJS also has ORM with MongoDB and localization baked in.

#!/usr/bin/env coffee

app = module.exports = require('railway').createServer()

if not module.parent
  port = process.env.PORT or 3000
  app.listen port
  console.log "Railway server listening on port %d within %s environment", port, app.settings.env