Quoting William Moss <willmoss26@gmail.com>:
Hi guys
Just a question....... I need some advice
I am looking to put together a RoR app to interface with an iPhone app
The iPhone app will be like a 'find the nearest' app. When the user runs it, it will take the user's location, send a JSON request to the RoR app running on a remote server with the location in the querystring
The RoR app should then send back a list of locations for a particular location for the iPhone app to display on the map.
Is there any good gems that might help with this? I already have the locations stored in the database along with and address, and can convert the address into lat/long using geocoding.
The part I am stuck about is an algorithm to search the database for the 'nearest' locations given a particular lat/long.
PostgreSQL with the PostGIS can do this. Look at GitHub - courtney-rosenthal/findit: A mobile-enabled web application and RESTful web service to find nearby facilities of interest around Austin.. It is a Sinatra app, not Rails but should give you working code to learn from.
HTH, Jeffrey