Posts

Showing posts from February, 2009

Walk On

A few months ago, Walkscore.com launched their new API , aimed a Real Estate sites, academic and other largescale studies, and anyone else who might want programmatic access to the walkability of a set of locations. Recently, a number of large sites ( zillow.com , Estately.com , BaseEstate.com , and ColoProperty.com amongst many others) have started to incorporate walkscore in their listings, which has led to the happy situation of ensuring the site can handle the popularity. When the good folks at Walkscore first contacted me about designing the API, we talked about the likelyhood we'd be serving many, many millions of daily requests shortly after launch. This quickly led into discussions about what framework we wanted to build it on, and how much IT we were interested in taking on. Eventually, we decided to use Google's AppEngine . Given the current, and quickly growing, popularity of the API, I think this ended up being a great choice - no worries about having to even...