Technology stack for a location based app

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

This might sound like a trivial question to a lot of people, but since I'm just beginning my tryst with LBS, this is turning out to be a nightmare.

At the simplest, what I'm trying to do is build foursquare :) ..naa..it's a travel app with data for places, events, etc. Not a new / big thing really. What I'm confused about is how people are storing this location data. On one side I see postGis (which looks complicated) and on the other hand I see simpleGeo's hosted platform (which sounds perfect for quick development). Both store lat, long only (as far as I can understand). Is that really all to storing location data ? Of course, I'm not mentioning the ability for spatial queries - which are present both in simpleGeo and postGis.

Also, is it a good idea, to create a special service over REST (maybe using Sinatra) specifically for location data - different from the main web app ?

This question might sound incomplete or not even a question :) - cause I frankly don't have any clue how to go about a LBS.

Thanks in advance !

manpreet 2 years ago

I have done a similar system using MongoDB as a spatial data server. The spatial queries that you will need to do for a system of this nature are quite simple, so no real need for a PostGIS store. MongoDB also has the advantage of being very quick to find and manipulate point data.