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codeforamerica / MuniciPal

:speech_balloon: Consulting city-dwellers about legislation near them.
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does the google geocoder have any licensing restrictions and what is the limit for requests? #98

Closed tbuckl closed 9 years ago

tbuckl commented 9 years ago

is it possible to point the geokit/geocoder section to an esri rest service at mesa it?

tbuckl commented 9 years ago

also, what would it take to move to geocoding line here out to a .js file, perhaps using the esri javascript API?

https://github.com/codeforamerica/MuniciPal/blob/master/app/controllers/addresses_controller.rb#L48

techieshark commented 9 years ago

Google says:

The Google Geocoding API has the following limits in place:

Users of the free API:

  • 2,500 requests per 24 hour period.
  • 5 requests per second.

I think we could move the geocoding to the client side, assuming we don't need a special key, and if we did that we'd get virtually unlimited usage (I think–assuming no one person would do more than 2,500 requests a day).

As it is, I'm not sure this would be an issue; even if everyone who visited the site looked at five locations, that'd be capacity for 500 visitors a day. Should we ask Mesa and/or Granicus how many visits per day the Legistar site gets, for a reference?

tbuckl commented 9 years ago

based on a brief discussion this morning, it seems like we won't be hitting the limit for geocoding, so this isn't a concern.

in case it later becomes a concern, it might make sense to send http requests to an esri geocoding rest service by writing a custom geocoder method for geokit: https://github.com/geokit/geokit#writing-your-own-geocoders