[LRUG] TFL Ruby API

[Jay Caines-Gooby]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Tom Taylor <tom at tomtaylor.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I started hacking away on a Ruby API for accessing TFL's services (starting
> with Journey Planner). Now, TFL are a bit crap and don't actually *have* any
> web APIs, so it's screen scraping through and through. That said, it looks
> totally feasible to parse suggested Journey Planner routes and the like.
>
> Anyway, it's really early days - only about 30 mins of code committed - but
> if you find yourself bored over the Christmas period, do chip in.
>
> My main reason for doing this is to show TFL what's possible when they open
> up this data, and use it for political leverage to encourage them to do so.
> When they do, we can swap out some of the interfaces. Yes, I am an optimist.
>
> http://github.com/tomtaylor/tfl/tree/master

Many moons ago, wearing an entirely different hat, I wrote the Sky
Active Journey Planner for TfL.

http://flickr.com/photos/jaygooby/4608933/

There were no feeds to work from then either :P - instead I wrote a
transcoding proxy that interrogated their wap service and munged the
results of that for the TV service. Rather than scraping the website,
you might be better working with their wml service, because then at
least you're getting well-formed xml...

Historically the lack of APIs is because the journey planning data
comes from a variety of disparate 3rd parties (many or all of whom
charge by query volume) so making APIs publicly available would
increase the cost to TfL. Not sure if this is still the case now...

http://wap.tfl.gov.uk/planner/

-- 
Jay Caines-Gooby
jay at gooby.org
+44 (0)7956 182625
skype: jaygooby
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