For awhile now I have considered creating an API for developers to be able to access some of the technologies in BatchGeo. Sure you could go about using the Google Maps API directly, but geocoding using their API can be slow and troublesome. For instance they don’t offer any mechanisms for caching your geocodes beyond the context of a single user. It also requires you write complex JavaScript to create maps.
I’d envision an API that really hardly resembled one. It would allow you to write basic HTML to access BatchGeo’s mechanism of geocoding and saving to a web page. Once a page is saved you’d be able to update it by changing the source HTML.
My question is: Do you think an API would be useful to you, and what would you like to see in it? Assuming this is going to put greater strain on the server and might require additional hardware dedicated… Would you be willing to pay a monthly fee to support such an API?
Let me know what you think by posting here!
