Talking to Plazes from Ruby

I’ve been experimenting with [[Ruby]] of late, and decided it would be good practice to try and code up a [[Plazes]] “Where Am I?” application to learn more about the languages ins and outs.

The result is PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz. This is my first Ruby script (or whatever they’re called), so I can’t claim that this is anywhere near Ruby best practices. But it works. To use the script:

• Get Ruby (here’s a place to start). Mac OS X users (post-Jaguar) can skip this step; you already have Ruby installed by default.
• Download PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz.
• tar -xzvf PlazesWhereAmIRuby-0.2.tar.gz
• Edit the file PlazesWhereAmIRuby.rb and replace the ‘username’ and ‘password’ with your Plazes username and password.
• ruby PlazesWhereAmIRuby.rb

The result will be something like this:

{“plazestate”=>”Prince Edward Island”, “username”=>”reinvented”, “plazelat”=>46.2361, “plazelon”=>-63.13, “plazecity”=>”Charlottetown”, “plazename”=>”Reinvented Office”, “plazeurl”=>”http://beta.plazes.com/plaze/2dbbe7a819b01317eb2ce58272b95f70/”, “plazecountry”=>”CA”}

…which is simply a dump of the parameters returned from the Plazes server.

Update: I’ve created a more general-purpose module for Ruby that implements not only the WhereAmI API, but also the Launcher API.