Today we started with the local.ch developer network. That’s a space where we want to provide stuff for developers. As a starting point, there is a small API to get a list of Swiss cities. That’s ideal for auto completion of cities (like we do on our search form) and I will demonstrate a usage tomorrow at the Tweakfest in Zürich (in the Technopark). The examples will then follow online as well.
More will of course follow. For now visit developer.local.ch.
As father of two small children, the last four years since the birth of our first has left us struggling to find information we never knew we needed. Just one of the “joys” of parenting, as anyone in our position knows, is finding a Kinderkrippe, especially in Zürich, where there’s endless demand.
The fun begins with finding suitable locations… on the way to work? Which bus or tram line? And when do they have an Open Day to visit? Thursday at 10am?!? Riiiiight. Then add your children to the waiting list. And wait. And call. And wait and so on. Of course much of this has to be packed into the peaceful 60 minutes after lunch, when the little darlings aren’t trying to crawl up your leg or eat the telephone.
Anyway, at least for the first step in this ritual, local.ch can make things a little easier. As Cédric already mentioned, we now have “near search” feature. When you find something you are searching for, you can search for something else in it’s vicinity.
Here’s how I could use it to help find potential locations of Kinderkrippen…
The first thing is to find the location that I want the Kinderkrippe to be near to, such as where I work at local.ch. So I head over to tel.local.ch and search for What: “local.ch” and Where: “Zürich”…
Now I can see “local.ch ag” as the first result on the list, so I click on it’s title to go to it’s “detail view”, so that only the result for local.ch is displayed.
Next I click on “Search in Area”, on the left of the result, and enter What “kinderkrippe”, at a distance of “1″ km and click the “Search” button. Below the result for local.ch I can now see all the Kinderkrippen within a 1km radius of local.ch…
Moving the mouse of the names of each Krippe, a point appears on the map, showing me where it is. Meanwhile, at the bottom left of the map, there’s a link “Show map points selection” – clicking on it allows me to add “Public Transport” points, such as bus stops, to the map, helping me figure out which Krippe best suits my journey to work in the morning (and taking children to the Krippe during rush hour is another little “joy”)…
Sadly this wasn’t around when we were searching for Krippen but, hopefully, it will make future parents a little less stressed…
For once – something for Web 2.0 geeks. The Plazes site helps you to keep track where your friends are. Visit plazes.com to learn more about it.
As a lab experiment – we created a Firefox Extension that gets your current location from Plazes.com and modifies the local.ch home page to show the appropriate city page and the map zoomed to the place. Useful to directly start a search at your location.
We thought that might also interest some of our users. You can download the Firefox Extension here:
http://files.chregu.tv/whereami/whereami.xpi
After installation – visit the Extension Preferences in Firefox: Tools > Add-ons > whereami > Preferences and provide your Plazes username and password. That is necessary to get your current location over the Plazes API. Once configured – visit www.local.ch – the homepage redirects to the city page and the map zooms. Of cause you need to have the Plazes client running during that time (to tell plazes.com where you are) and it’s only useful if you are in Switzerland ;-)
Many thanks to chregu from Liip for hacking the extension.
Update May 20th: Just added support to display your Plazes friends on the map. You might have to zoom-out if no friend is in close distance. Run the Add-ons “Find Updates” to update to the latest release.
(Deutsch siehe unten)
A quick overview of the new features and changes we did this week:
Eine Übersicht an Verbesserungen und Änderungen die wir diese Woche veröffentlicht haben:
Writing JUnitTests for code that writes data to the database has always proven to be not that easy.
Probably the most obvious way to do it is generating a bunch of test data, to write it to the database, to read the data back from db and to compare the read data to the one originally generated. This way the writers (insert/update/delete) and readers are all tested.
The problem I faced was comparing the originally created objects to the one resulting from the Data Access Objects (DAOs) reading from the db. In my case the test data wasn’t just stored in one object but instead a JavaBean containing collections of other JavaBeans, one-to-many relationship that is. That means comparing doesn’t just mean putting five equals statements into an if statement.
I came up with a helper class that lets you find the differences – recursively – of two arbitrary objects of the same class:
DifferenceFinder.getDifferences(myObject, myOtherObject)
the method returns a Map of differences:
{"addresses.name": ["differs"],
"categories": ["id 345 is missing in left object", "id 34 is missing in right object"]
}
you can also exclude some fields from being compared:
Collection<String> exclude = new LinkedList<String>();
exclude.add("categories.last_updated");
exclude.add("addresses.number_of_pets");
DifferenceFinder.getDifferences(myObject, myOtherObject);
In fact the “deep comparison” is already solved by the EqualsBuilder in the apache commons lang libraries. What their libabry doesn’t solve is the problem of comparing two collections: In order to know which objects in a collection should be compared to which objects in the other collection, it is inevitable to get an id for each object in the collection. Therefore I introduced a Diffable interface which all objects in a collection have to meet. The DifferenceFinder searches for the shortest get*Id method of the object in the collection and calls this method to get the id of the object. If you don’t like this magic you can implement the DiffablePrecise interface which urges you to add the method getDiffableId
In the end you can just use examples above and let DifferenceFinder eventually yell at you to add some implements Diffable or rather implements DiffablePrecise and you get your job done.
Four java files served as differencefinder.jar or differencefinder_source jar.
DifferenceFinder depends on the apache commons lang libraries. We are using the DifferenceFinder for many tests now so the code seems stable. The code is public domain. That means do with it whatever you want.