It was about a year ago that I released the first public version of RGeo, a geospatial framework for Rails and Ruby applications, along with a bunch of add-on libraries and ActiveRecord adapters designed to work with it.
RGeo has enjoyed some success so far. But over the past year, I’ve fielded a number of questions from folks struggling with it, and I’ve come to realize that it is not very easy to learn or use. A lot of that is my fault. The core RGeo framework is fairly complex, and neither RGeo itself nor its add-on libraries are particularly well documented. Furthermore, geospatial technology is not an easy topic in general. A number of concepts and a fair amount of math has to be understood before you can really get off the ground with a location-aware application beyond the most simple display of a few pushpins on a Google map.
My hope is to start changing that.
For the past few months, I’ve been heads-down on the product releases for Pirq, where I’m the chief architect. But as those projects ease up a bit, I’m going to try to spend more time giving RGeo some love. And as part of that, I’m starting up a series of articles on doing geospatial programming in Ruby and Rails apps, using RGeo.