I've been using GeocodeFarm for several years now, but it's been a struggle lately. The support is very slow and not at all supportive and technical issues they are having started to insfluence the business - for example, to get a result now you sometimes need to query their server 2 to 10 times before you actually get it and there's no ETA on fixing it.
I'm now looking for a good replacement for it. Unfortunately, we cannot use Google Maps as they restrict their usage (even paid-as-you-go one) for commercial projects and i'm not able to pay for permium services as we are not that big.
Are there any reasonably priced and reliable alternative for GeocodeFarm? We are now paying £100/month for 25k requests and are ok with the price
geocode.xyz ($100 per month no limit cap)
Related
We have an application with 10 millions lines of code in 4GL(Progress) and a database also OpenEdge with 300 Tables. My Boss says we should migrate it to a new Programming language and a new Database Management system.
My questions are:
Do you think we should migrate it? Do you think Progress has a "future"?
If we should migrate it, how, are there any tools? Or should we begin with programming from scratch?
Thank you for the help.
Ablo
Unless your boss has access to an unlimited budget, endless user patience and a thirst for frustration and agony you should not waste any time thinking about rewrites.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Yes, Progress has a future. They probably will never be as sexy an option as Microsoft or Oracle or whatever the cool kids are using this week. But they have been around for 30 years and they will still be here when you and your boss retire.
There are those who will rain down scorn on Progress because it isn't X or it doesn't have Y. Maybe they can rewrite your 10 million lines of code next weekend and prove just how right they are. I would not, however, pay them for those efforts until after the user acceptance tests are passed and the implementation is completed.
A couple of years later (the original post being from 2014 and the answers being from 2014 to 2015) :
The post, which has gotten the most votes is argumenting basically two fold :
a. Progress (Openedge) has been around for a long time and is not going anywhere soon
b. Unless your boss has access to an unlimited budget, endless user patience and a thirst for frustration and agony you should not waste any time thinking about rewrites: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
With regard to a:
Yes, the Progress OpenEdge Stack is still around. But from my experience the difficulty to find experienced and skilled Openedge has gotten even more difficult.
But also an important factor here, which i think has evolved to much greater importance, since this discussion started:
The available Open Source Stacks for application development have gotten by factors better, both in terms of out-of-box functionality and quality and have decisively moved in direction of RAD.
I am thinking for instance of Spring Boot, but not only, see https://stackshare.io/spring-boot/alternatives. In the Java realm Spring Boot is certainly unique. Also for the development of rich Webui's many very valid options have emerged, which certainly are addressing RAD requirements, just some "arbitrary" examples https://vaadin.com for Java, but also https://www.polymer-project.org for Javascript, which are interestingly converging both with https://vaadin.com/flow.
Many of the available stacks are still evolving strongly, but all have making life easier for the developer as strong driver. Also in terms of architectures you will find a convergence of many of this stacks with regard basic building blocks and principles: Separation of Interfaces from Implementation, REST API's for remote communication, Object Relational Mapping Technologies, NoSql / Json approaches etc etc.
So yes the Open Source Stack are getting very efficient in terms of Development. And what must also be mentioned, that the scope of these stacks do not stop with development: Deployment, Operational Aspects and naturally also Testing are a strong ,which in the end also make the developers life easier.
Generally one can say the a well choosen Mix and Match of Open Source Stacks have a very strong value proposition, also on the background of RAD requirements, which a proprietary Stack, will have in the long run difficulty to match - at least from my point of view.
With regard to b:
Interestingly enough i was just recently with a customer, who is looking to do exactly this: rewrite their application. The irony: they are migrating from Progress to Progress OpenEdge, with several additional Open Edge compliant Tools. The reason two fold: Their code is getting very difficult to maintain and would refactoring in order to address requirements coming from Web Frontends. Also interesting, they are not finding enough qualified developers.
Basically: Code is sound and lives , when it can be refactored and when it can evolve with new requirements. Unfortunately there many examples - at least from my experience - to contrary.
Additionally End-of-Lifecyle of Software can force a company, to "rewrite" at least layers of their software. And this doesn't necessarily have to bad and impossible. I worked on a Project, which migrated over 300 Oracle Forms forms to a Java based UI within less then two years. This migration from a 2 tier to a 3 tier architecture actually positioned the company to evolve their architecture to address the needs of Web Ui's. So actually in the end this "rewrite" and a strong return of value also from the business perspective.
So to cut a (very;-)) long story short:
One way or another, it is easy to go wrong with generalizations.
You need not begin programming from scratch. There is help available online and yes, you can contact Progress Technical Support if you find difficulties. Generally, ABL code from previous version should work with only little changes. Here are few things that you need to do in order to migrate your application:
Backup databases
Backup source code and .r files
Truncate DB bi files
Convert your databases
Recompile ABL code and test
http://knowledgebase.progress.com articles will help you in this. If you are migrating from some older versions like 9, you can find a good set of new features. You can try them but only after you are done with your conversion.
If you are migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit and if you are using 32-bit libraries, you need to replace them with 64-bit
The first question I'd come back with is 'why'? If the application is not measuring up that's one thing, and the question needs to be looked at from that perspective.
If the perception is that Progress is somehow a "lesser" application development and operating environment, and the desire is only to move to a different development and operating environment - you'll end up with a lot of resources in time, effort, and money invested - not to mention the opportunity cost - and for what? To run on a different database platform? Will migrating result in a lower TCO? Faster development turn-around time? Quicker time to market? What's expected advantage in moving from Progress, and how long will it take to recover the migration cost - if ever?
Somewhere out there is a company who had similar thoughts and tried to move off of Progress and the ABL. The effort failed to meet their target performance and functionality metrics, so they eventually gave up on the migration, threw in the towel, and stayed with Progress - after spending $25M on the project.
Can your company afford that kind of risk / reward ratio?
Progress (Openedge) has been around for a long time and is not going anywhere soon. And rewriting 10 Million lines of code in any language just to use the current flavor of the month would never be worth it unless your current application is not doing what you need. Even then bringing it up to current needs would normally be a better solution.
If you need to migrate your current application to the latest version of Openedge (Progress) you would normally just make a copy of your database(s) and convert it/them to the new version of Openedge and compile your your code against the new databases and shake the bugs out. You may have some keyword issues, but this is usually pretty minor.
If you need help with programming I would suggest contacting Progress Software and attending the yearly trade show or going to https://community.progress.com/ and asking/looking for local user groups. The local user groups would be a stellar place to find local programming talent.
Hope this helps.....
This isn't exactly a programming question but it's relevant to programmers, and I'm looking for a data-backed, specific answer.
I'm working in a field where the size of the files we create is doubling roughly every 100 days. Nielsen's Law suggests that connection speeds are increasing by about 50% every year, which would mean doubling every 600 days. There is some talk of doing our processing on AWS or some other cloud computing service.
To me, this seems implausible, since the time required to upload the data will soon dwarf the time for processing. However, Nielsen's Law (original article by Nielsen) was made for end user connection speeds, so I'm not sure I can make my point with that.
Does anyone know of a public resource on AWS connection speeds, or institutional (e.g. university or corporation, not residential) connection speeds, over time? I'm wanting to know if it is just larger than residential, but still increasing at the same rate, or if for some reason connection speeds to institutional customers might be increasing faster than Nielsen's Law. Any help in finding evidence on the trend over time for this is appreciated.
I'd think just coming up with a nice pretty graph plotting estimated data download time into the future ought to make your point.
I can't speak for Neilsen's law, but your question in terms of AWS is nearly impossible to answer (in practical, "how should we spend this money" terms).
AWS's connection speeds vary depending on who you are, how much money you have to spend, and where you're located. For example, can you colocate a rack in Reston, VA? How about another datacenter provider used by Amazon? There are three per AZ. If you can, you can likely negotiate much more bandwidth between your rack and theirs than would be available normally. Are you a customer the size of Foursquare? Are you planning on running your jobs on 20,000 instances? I'm sure Amazon network engineering will help you squeeze out every drop of bandwidth you can, and probably write a white paper about it, too. There's rumor of dedicated, non-public-internet pipes between eu-west and us-east. The network map of today's cloud won't likely resemble 2017's at all.
This isn't to suggest your question is wrong or bad, just that it's difficult to answer. As a thought experiment, it's fascinating. As an argument in a discussion about long-term capacity planning and capital outlay, I'm not sure it's as useful.
I lost track of this effort years ago but have need to geocode thousands of addresses nightly. I must use the very accurate database sitting on the machine, installed when the Nuvi map update installed Mapsource.
When I contacted Garmin years ago, they expressed an interest in providing an API for this, but then I heard nothing and did not follow up. Their database is provided by navtec? I believe. Anyone have experience with that format?
I posted on the Garmin Developer forum a while ago, but its a little lethargic over there :)
Has anyone done this?
Does anyone know how it might be done without an API; meaning database structure and calls?
I'll take a solution in any language.
Added:
Garmin has expressed an interest in making this available to me. They just have not done it.
I do not know the database format.
I am NOT looking for an online solution or any other "alternative". This question is very specific.
Talk to Navtec directly. They will sell you or license you their database directly. The database tables are clearly documented, then write your own Geocoder on top. Took me about a week 4 years ago, and I was marginally profficient in SQL at the time.
You can geocode up to 10,000/day by city with NN4D after you get their free application key.
You can geocode for $18 per 1,000 with CoreLogic (aka Proxix)
Yahoo looked most promising because it has the Hadoop feature, which is also currently being utilized at Navteq. I've contacted a guy at Navteq who uses Hadoop, and I'm awaiting his feedback. According to Ben Lorica's article on Datameer O'Reilly.com entitled "Big Data Tool for Business Analysts", Datameer can upload from spreadsheets to Hadoop. Hadoop is a pipeline to Navteq.
Starting point - a list of the tools at the GIS Dept at USC
(I can only have one link because I'm new, but I'll add the rest when I get my points up.
naveteq uses oracle format
BUT HOLD 1 SECOND:
doing 1000 lookups(per night) is easy,
doing 10000 lookups(per night) requires a good server,
doing 1000000 lookups(per night) requires a cluster
letting them do the searches requires less hardware(and more traffic) using xml-rpc or similar rpc would be the best( for everyone)
buy oracle db and start working
you can use almost anything BUT keeping in mind the volume you should use a compile language like c++
gpsbabel.org has lots of stuff on converting between lots of GPS formats, and a downloadable tool. My limited experience, mostly with google maps, streetview etc. is that geocoding is not very accurate.
cM
The free IBM DB2 Express-C DBMS comes with Spatial Extender that can be used to GEOcode US addresses. See a webinar on this. Don't know if this is exact fit but it can't hurt to take a look.
Also take a quick look the DB2 documentation http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9r7/topic/com.ibm.db2.luw.spatial.topics.doc/doc/csbp3008.html
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I have an application which needs to get intraday stock quotes on several assets (indices, commodities etc').
I want to be able to query the data in HTTP and get it as CSV/XML format.
Now, I'd like to be able to ask the data provider for example what was the last bid/ask/price on GE (General Electric) at 4:00PM, and ask it in let's say 4:05PM on that day, for further processing.
Similar services to what I'm looking for:
Reuter's DataLink service can give me this data on the last trade of the day.
I need it to flow through all day long - intraday.
Yahoo Finance (the query formay within it) is a great service which does what I want in terms of data delivery yet I'm unsure regarding its reliability/timing since it's free.
Also, I couldn't find any information regarding the delay of the data they provide relatively from the real world timing (like many websites give this data in delay of ~20min).
QuoteRSS gives this for free as well, it let's me pick a ticket and get its data, yet once again I'm unsure regarding its reliability, as well as its timing, which I have doubt if this is "realtime" or close to that.
Finally this blog post by google "At long last, real-time stock quotes are here" claims to offer free data on certain stocks, but in Google Finance's pages I can't find anything about it, nor at their API pages, and again, who knows what delay I get from the realtime data.
In addition to the concern with the above mentioned services (Yahoo, QuoteRSS & Google) I'm not sure how/if they provide an intraday information regarding the stocks, something which I need.
Worth mentioning is that many websites which deal with Forex claim to be getting their data feed from Reuters/Bloomberg.
Didn't find such a solution on both's sites. I even went online with a sales rep. at Reuters to ask about it and his answer, after a decent discussion, was that "he's afraid he cannot offer me anything better than their service DataLink". How odd!!
So to summarize my question;
1) Where do I get such data feed, in which I select several tickets from several markets, and get a closer-than-20min information regarding these tickets, in concise format (CSV/XML)?
2) If Reuters/Bloomberg offer it (I'll probably also call them later) - where is it being offered, at their websites? I'd like to get the data from a "big name" such as these guys, for reliability reasons.
3) Regarding "realtime" or not, it depends on the cost. What costs should I prepare to? I'm assuming that realtime feed costs a LOT, so, is there an option between realtime and the 20min delayed feed? Something like 2-5min delay?
4) Please mention how, or if, I can query for stocks' data in a timely manner, like "what was the price of GOOG at 4:00PM?".
Note #1:
Please keep in mind, when answering, that I need the quotes intraday and not "by the end of the day".
Note #2:
If google/yahoo do actually offer this kind of service for free, how do I find it? Directly. I don't mind starting with these "freewares" for testing and such, especially if I can query for data in a timely manner as mentioned above ("what was the price of GOOG at 4:00PM?").
Note #3:
In terms of licensing, I do not intend to resell this information. Simply as that.
Before they closed shop, I used opentick. My blog post about opentick shutting down got quite a bit of traffic, so I decided to write another post that examined some potential opentick alternatives. Take a look at the companies in the post and comments. Hopefully one of them will work for you.
I have used IQFeed for some time. It is not HTTP or a CSV but it is a streaming push of ticks from their servers to you. The client is a bit kludgy but overall I find it to be acceptable for the price. This type of feed would be considered "realtime" by most people and since you are talking about minutes I assume that you are someone who is not worried about a couple seconds of latency here or there.
I have experience with Reuters (Thomson) feeds. They are expensive since we are now talking about TotalView/OpenBook data. This would be used to calculate the history of the order book and could be used for analyzing things like the liquidity of an equity at different price levels. I had a good experience with them at another job. 24/7 Engineering support, fixes, decent security db. The reality is that there is a wide variety of ways to get these feeds mostly from brokerages. I don't think this is what you are looking for since you mentioned things that were free.
There are "mid tier" providers like CQG although I have no experience with them.
In general no matter who you are using you need to be willing to implement their protocol and format. I have found this to be true no matter which feed I use. The good news is that all you need to do is make a parser.
What was the price of Google at 4:00PM? Who can say. Which part of 4PM? Would the price at 4PM would be something like the final print to the tape of the closing auction? Is it the auction midpoint? The price is what you can transact at which can be very different then what you see printed. ;-P
A final note: If you are building a trading system of some sort pay for your data. It should be cleaner than trying to assemble it. The exchanges charge for data and there is no real way around it. If you can't afford a couple of hundred bucks a month for some data then you probably don't have enough capital to be trading.
Concerning Bloomberg, I just called them & they said that they only provide market data for personal use. So you cannot show it on your site, but you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don't publish it.
I am assessing some tools to manage software develpment projects. Dotproject seems a good one, but i would like to learn of other's experinces using it for software development.
Thanks.
I've been using Assembla for a small team and loving it. The web interface is very elegant, and it gives me power and simplicity at the same time.
My favorite feature is the strong ticketing system which allows me to create tickets on the web, assign them to developers, associate them with other tickets, estimate the time it takes to close the ticket, and aggregate those times graphically. It really shines, though, with its version control and ticket integration. Being able to specify that this commit is related to ticket #45, fixes bug #78, and closes ticket #32 is very nice.
They offer version control hosting for multiple version control systems - including SVN and GIT.
They offer free and paid packages.
For more information, check out their usage videos here.
Oh, and do let us know what you decide and why :)
An old post, I know...
I used to be a core member of the dotproject team and used it for years and set up many organizations on it... ranging from small non-profits and software shops to major government projects. It tended to work relatively well. Unfortunately, due to the crawl of development, half the dotproject team split to form web2project and we've been there almost two years.
At present, we (web2project) does a quarterly release and have done major work on the code. We've closed ~100+ bugs, added dozens of features like iCal feeds, and improved performance by 95% and cut about 1/3 of the code overall. And yes, we have an upgrade path from dotProject.