[LRUG] TFL Ruby API

[Eliot Sykes]

TFL widgets are recent news to me, although that means nothing, these could
have been around for donkey years:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/widgets/

Their existence is a sign that TFL are not shy to making their data more
accessible, which is nice.

Eliot

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Jay Caines-Gooby <jay at gooby.org> wrote:

> 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
> gtalk: jaygooby at gmail.com
> AIM: jaygooby
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