Spindrop

[tags]geocoding, caching, REST, symfony, Cache_Lite, php, cache, sfFunctionCache[/tags]

For reviewsby.us we do a lot of geocoding. To facilitate we use Yahoo! Geocoding API. This helps us normalize data, obtain latitude and longitude, interpret location specific searches.

These REST queries happen a lot and will continue to happen, but this data that Yahoo! provides is fairly static. We're basically querying a database of sorts. So it makes sense that we should cache this data.

We'll demonstrate how to cache these queries using symfony's sfFunctionCache class.

I wrote a wrapper (I'll release it as a plugin if requested) for the Geocoding API, the bulk of the work (the REST call) occurs in a function called doQueryGIS:

The call to this function is always wrapped with queryGIS:

This wrapper creates a sfFunctionCache objet and calls the function and caches it for subsequent queries.

What this means is once Yahoo! teaches reviewsby.us that India is located at (25.42°, 77.830002°) and that the precision is 'country' we remember it in the future.

These features will be incorporated into future versions of reviewsby.us.