Re: Interest in data-type class for location / address?

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Philippe Jausions <pear@11abacus.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm looking for input for a package that would deal with locations and > addresses in a generic manner for PEAR packages. The idea would be to > have an interface (and class reference implementation) to handle > location-related data such as street address, country, region code, post > office box, poste restante status and so on. > > Such class would allow to easily pass data from one package to the next. > For instance, a vCard could contain such location instance for an office > address which we'll be able to simply pass on to Payment_Process package > as a billing address. > > I'm also working on other related packages to validate mailing addresses > against some web services, such as the US Postal Service. Such location > instance could also, of course, be passed to shipping related packages > if needed; I understand Kristopher Ives is working on a > Services_Shipping package. > > Since this kind of data is rather used often, wouldn't it make sense to > have a dedicated package for it? > > For my own usage, I've already started putting something together, and > you can review it here: > http://pear.11abacus.com/package/Structures_Location > > Note that it's far from complete, and it's especially missing a > formatter class. > > Since there are a lot of idiosyncrasies for each country, a > multi-cultural community such as PEAR should greatly help with ironing > out details. > > Let me know what you think. Thanks, Sounds good... I have a lot of use for something like this. My only request would be a little more abstract thinking about the term 'Location' - in some instances this may not always refer to a location you can ship a package or mail a letter to. For example, a location may be simply - a greenspace/park, the park fountain, the apex of a mountain, a geo-cache etc. I see that you have getGeodetic etc, but also getStreetAddress etc. I would suggest some restructuring to handle some of these details in separate classes. class JohnDoeAddress implements Shippable, StreetAddress, PersonalResidence class GreenSpace implements SpatialData, LatitudeLongitude --- this represents some short sighted thinking about the issue, but I think this should be considered before assuming any location has a street address. With that said - Philippe, this sounds like a very good idea - along with the formatters for vcard etc. -- Brett Bieber http://saltybeagle.com/