This Grails plugin provides a Spring bean named geocodingService which uses the Google Geocoding API to perform geocoding and reverse geocoding.

Geocoding

The service provides two methods for geocoding, i.e. converting an address to latitude/longitude coordinates. One of these methods returns a single result and the other returns a list of results.

// get a single location matching the provided address
Point location = geocodingService.getPoint('Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland')
Float latitude = location.latitude
Float longitude = location.longitude

// get a list of locations matching the address 'Birmingham'
List<Point> location = geocodingService.getPoints('Birmingham')

Optional arguments

A second optional Map argument may be provided to either of the above methods. This Map supports the following entries:

• sensor a boolean that indicates whether or not the request comes from a device with a location sensor. If omitted, false is assumed.
• max an integer that limits the number of results returned. This value is ignored when getPoint is called (because this method always returns at most 1 result)
• parameters that are defined as optional in the API docs

// geocode the address 'Newcastle' with the results biased to Ireland.
// A maximum of 2 locations should be returned
List<Point> results = geocodingService.getPoint('Newcastle', [max: 2, region: 'ie'])

Reverse Geocoding

The service provides two methods for reverse geocoding, i.e. converting a latitude/longitude coordinate to an address. One of these methods returns a single result and the other returns a list of results.

// convert a coordinate to an address
Point coordinate = new Point(latitude: 40.714224, longitude: -73.961452)
Address address = geocodingService.getAddress(coordinate)
println address.formattedAddress

// convert a coordinate to a list of addresses
List<Address> addresses = geocodingService.getAddresses(coordinate)

Optional arguments

A second optional Map argument may be provided to either of the above methods. This Map supports the following entries:

• sensor a boolean that indicates whether or not the request comes from a device with a location sensor. If omitted, false is assumed.
• max an integer that limits the number of results returned. This value is ignored when getAddress is called (because this method always returns at most 1 result)
• parameters that are defined as optional in the API docs

// convert a coordinate to a list of addresses in the French language.
// A maximum of 2 results should be returned
Point coordinate = new Point(latitude: 40.714224, longitude: -73.961452)
List<Point> addresses = service.getAddresses(coordinate, [language: 'fr', max: 2])

Configuration

HTTP/HTTPS

By default requests are submitted to the Google Geocoding API over HTTPS. To use HTTP instead, add the following to Config.groovy

geocode.useHttp = true

Release History

• 0.3 - Uses HTTPS by default
• 0.2 - Added support for HTTPS
• 0.1 - Initial release