zip by latitude and longitude with geonames and groovy

The titles says it. Geonames is publicly available RESTful web services provider. One of the services is findNearbyPostalCodesJSON. You give it a latitude and longitude and it gives you back a list of zip codes in JSON format. Try it for my neck of the woods:
 http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodesJSON?formatted=true&lat=39.998&lng=-82.8841

The gotcha is that you can make only up to 2000 service calls per day, after that you are asked to pay and service does not give you back your so desired zip codes.

And here is how we can do it with groovy and HTTPBuilder. You are going to need the following dependencies, assuming a maven project:

<dependency>

<groupId>commons-cli</groupId>

<artifactId>commons-cli</artifactId>

<version>1.1</version>

</dependency>

<dependency>

  <groupId>org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder</groupId>

  <artifactId>http-builder</artifactId>

  <version>0.5.2</version>

</dependency>

And the code:

def http = new HTTPBuilder( 'http://ws.geonames.org' )

http.request( GET, JSON ) {

uri.path = '/findNearbyPostalCodesJSON'

uri.query = [ formatted: true, lat: 39.998, lng: -82.8841 ]

response.success = { resp, json ->

   

   println json

   return json.postalCodes[0].postalCode

 }

 response.failure = { resp ->

 

   log.error("Unexpected error: ${resp.status} : ${resp.statusLine.reasonPhrase}")

   return ""

 }

Hope this is helpful to someone some day.

Cheers!