I’m spending this weekend at Alexandra Palace at the Mashed event that’s being arranged by the BBC. I went to the similar “Hack Day” event that they ran last year (and blogged about it) and had a great time. This time I’ll actually be there in a vaguely official capacity as Multimap and Microsoft are supporting the event. Multimap have already blogged about it but I thought I’d write a few lines too and release some software that might come in handy.

One thing that we’re really proud of at Multimap is our RESTful web service APIs. These give you access to geocoding and (faux) reverse geocoding services as well as access to our great search APIs.

As part of a project I’ve been working on in my spare time I’ve put together some ruby wrappers for these APIs so I thought I’d get these released in case they come in handy for anyone during Mashed. I’m not an experienced Ruby programmer so I can’t give any assurances of the quality but hopefully they’ll come in handy. You’ll need to have the ‘json’ library installed as well as Net::HTTP. I’ve only used it in a rails setting by placing the .rb files in the lib directory so your mileage may vary. I’d really appreciate comments, bug fixes and anything more you’d like to add. The libraries give you access to geocoding, national grid conversion together with a few handy geo-related classes (lat/lon, bounding box class).

Unfortunately I haven’t got around to wrapping the search API but it shouldn’t be too hard to do, I might even do it as a hack during Mashed. I might see if anyone’s added any comments before deciding whether to do it though :D

So download mmruby 0.1 here and tell me what you think of it below!

Technorati tags: ruby, mashed08, multimap, web, service, REST