Mapping Hacks

Track a Package Across the U.S. #86

Chapter 7, Names and Places

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HACK

Working with them quickly transforms your project from a hack into a full-

scale software development effort.

Instead of making use of the programming APIs of the major shippers, we’ll

use a much older hacking technique: copy and paste. Look up your pack-

age’s tracking information in the usual way. Then create a text file listing the

city and state of each location in chronological order, and save it in a file

named places.txt. Your file should look something like this:

Seattle, WA

Austin, Texas

Chicago, Illinois

Boston, Massachusetts

Medford, Massachusetts

Now we’re ready to map these locations. To do this, we’ll need to translate

our list of place names into a list of geographic coordinates, which is a job

we already tackled in “Geocode U.S. Locations with the GNIS”

[Hack #85],

which leverages a U.S. Geological Survey database of places for this purpose.

The Code

PackageTracker.java is a Java program that can be run from the command

line. It knows how to read the little place-name text file we created and use

the

GNISCoords class [Hack #85] for geocoding the entries. It can write the new

information to disk, or simply to stdout, which can be piped into other

applications on Unix-ish operating systems like Mac OS X, Linux, and

Solaris. For our purposes, write it to disk so that our mapping program can

find it.

The program is too