Zipcodesearch

This is the location search code that powers http://walkingboss.org. It includes some free zip code data and an example controller/view—everything you need to get you up and running in about 10 minutes. If you are going to use this in a real application, I recommend buying commercial zip code data from http://zipcodeworld.com or somewhere similar.

Full credit for the geodetic algorithms must go to Thomas Kurek, who posted a great article, with C# code, on CodeProject.com about a year and a half ago (see: http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/Zip_code_radius_search.asp).

Installation

Very quick version: > ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/zipcodesearch/trunk > ruby script/generate zip_code_search ZipCode > rake migrate # This will take a looooong time!*

You should then be able to use the example at: http://localhost:3000/zip_code_search_example/index.

Please see: http://zipcodesearch.rubyforge.org for more info.

• If you want the initial migration to go faster, use your database’s native CSV importing functionality to import the file reference in the migration. Since the migration attempts to be database agnostic, it will parse every one of the 45,000 lines and insert a row using ActiveRecord.

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly