I’m finally working on a project that has a public component (besides a login screen), and the lisp has been flowing. I’ve been able to put in probably around 10 hours a week on this thing, and I can’t wait until its more presentable to show off. As part of this, we’re building up our work lisp codebase, and I’ve been keeping my eye out for opportunities to open source different library components, and trying to avoid creating a big ball of mud.
The first real candidate so far was adw-charting, but I think I found the next potentials: adw-yahoo and adw-google. They will be libraries for interfacing with various Yahoo! and Google services. So far I’ve only got code for one service apiece, but there’s plenty of growth potential.
Here’s a sample:
(defun geocode-fight ()
(let ((adw-yahoo:*api-key* "YAHOO APPID")
(adw-google:*api-key* "GOOGLE API-KEY")
(address "5308 SW 75th ter, Gainesville FL, 32608"))
(list
(adw-yahoo:latlong address :cache-p nil)
(adw-google:latlong address :cache-p nil))))
(geocode-fight)
=> (("address" 29.604265 -82.42349 "5308 SW 75th Ter")
(8 29.604923 -82.42338 "5308 SW 75th Terrace, Gainesville, FL 32608, USA"))
Yahoo and Google give back different some different data, but so far Yahoo’s coordinates seem more accurate. One thing I noticed was that Google’s geocoding service gives a different lat/long than what maps.google.com displays, which I thought was a little sneaky. I’ve also got some code to help construct google map widgets, using the homegrown html template system and parenscript, but I think much of that will end up getting stripped out, as it depends on the in-house libraries that are likely completely useless to anyone but us.
Still lots to do before either of those libs would be ready for a cl-net request, but it’s on the plate. After building so much on top of so many great free libraries, the need to contribute something back is very strong.