How to Add Geocoding Lookup to Your App in 5 Minutes

Let’s say you are building a mobile app where you enter an address and need to get back the location as latitude/longitude information. To do this in Appery.io Server Code is super simple. Here is a Server Code script that looks up an address and returns the latitude/longitude information for the location using the Google Geocoding API:

var address = request.get("address");
var url = "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json"; 

var XHRResponse = XHR2.send("GET", url, {
   "parameters": {
      "address": address,
      "key": "AIzaSyAFQBtqmC.........."
    }
});

var responseInJson = JSON.parse(XHRResponse.body);

Apperyio.response.success(responseInJson.results[0].geometry.location, "application/json");

When you run this script, the result looks like this (using Boston as input):

{
   "lng": -71.0588801,
   "lat": 42.3600825
}

The script has an API which you can invoke from your app:

https://api.appery.io/rest/1/code/540cb503-f9a7-4dd1-8926-af959383e2b2/exec?address=Boston

Here is an example invoking the script directly from the browser:

Invoking the Server Code Script

With geolocation logic on the server, you can change the implementation. For example you can use a different API without making any changes to the app and impacting the users.