Prolific Programmer on the Internets!

I've been working with Jameel on filtering the local Craigslist board. Lifehacker suggests an alternate approach using Google. So, you process your query using the search api, parse what comes out the other end, and apply whatever filters you configured. It would be good for people like Elie, who replies to posts "wanting to talk, usually on the phone ... i always post in different cities ... then i don't have to meet anyone in person ... and i call with my number blocked". Perhaps if she ever gets some social skills, she'd ask for help, but I'm not holding my breath.

The other day, I was looking for a Whole Foods Grocer to pick up fruit from. My sat nav took claimed it was in a deserted warehouse southeast of the Mission District. Lo and behold, it was not. On finishing cursing it sufficiently, I wondered if there was a better way to maintain business listings on the web. After a while of mulling over ideas, I found out. There are several, incomplete physical business directories on the web. One of these is yelp. Hell, they even have a REST API. Along with JSR 179, we can get a location.

So, our business results just require putting the code in a bean, exposing the latitude and longitude, plugging it in to the appropriate yelp call and seeing what comes out. Examining this further, it looks like it comes out as JSON, which can be easily parsed into objects, in this case we want Java objects. Shove them into a TreeMap, bearing in mind the possibility of a null key exception, with a comparator to sort by rating and then distance, then present it.

As a first step, let's see if Yelp grants me access to their API. Reading the terms, I actually fail to see what's so restrictive about it. Eventually, I plan to seed my own phone directory with the yelp information and allow users to update the information as they find new things. Also, to add notes, like price of petrol for petrol pumps and allow the data to be sorted based on that.