CloudMine Introduces Geospatial Object Querying

CloudMine Introduces Geospatial Object Querying(blog.cloudmine.me)

51 points by mweil 14 years ago | 14 comments

jrubinovitz 14 years ago |

Is this the Geolocation API the Marauder's Map team at PennApps used this to build a virtual Marauder's Map? If so, now it suddenly makes sense how they had time to make the awesome UI design. I definitely agree on the feedback looking for examples. I'd love to see some open source Cloudmine apps.

mweil 14 years ago | |

It is indeed! Marauder's Map runs on CloudMine.

jasonkolb 14 years ago |

I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what CloudMine is. It looks like a server-side object store that also lets you execute server-side code, is that right? Is there a sample use case somewhere that I missed?

mweil 14 years ago | |

Right now, those are the essentials. Those two things are huge barriers to entry for many people trying to write mobile apps, and people love when we do it for them. Right now we are trying to cover our bases with the basic things that almost all mobile apps need, and then we will start exploring more exotic offerings. Keep on the lookout!

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us directly at team at cloudmine dot me.

JonLim 14 years ago |

Very neat! Had no idea about CloudMine before, but always happy to see alternatives to Parse and whatever other mobile backend service providers there are out there.

Congrats!

mweil 14 years ago | |

Thanks! Glad you know about us now. One of our big differences from Parse is our focus on server-side requirements as well as client-side. Case in point, our server side code execution environment. Check it out if you're interested. http://blog.cloudmine.me/post/15748285350/server-side-superp...

chrisacky 14 years ago | | |

mweil, I just spent 10 minutes on your website, and I still am finding it very difficult to understand what it is you do.

Some tangible examples would really help prospective visitors. I remember seeing the site before in an article on TechCrunch and thinking exactly the same. The article on TechCrunch explains what it is that you do, a lot better than your examples.

I don't want to "Get Started" in order to have to figure out how your product can help.

I'm in the need for a mobile port of my application, so I really would like to see all of the potential offerings that are out there, but CloudMine has fallen way short on being able to explain what it is that you do? </trying to be constructive criticism - so don't take it the wrong way>.

The site looks good though :)

epaulson 14 years ago |

Looks neat. No storage costs? Is there a catch on some size limits somewhere? I looked through the API docs but didn't see any.

Point storage with radius queries are nice and all, but I'd love to find a cloud storage provider that stored polygons and took polygons as queries, and had pay only for what you use.

mweil 14 years ago | |

You got it! No storage costs. We have a soft limit of 20k per object, but I doubt many people are going to come close to brushing that. And it's all free right now anyway.

Someone just tweeted at us earlier about GeoJSON (http://geojson.org/) which looks pretty awesome for storing polygon data. It sparked a conversation internally about a feature like that, especially since SimpleGeo (which offered that, I believe) is gone.

That point aside, geofencing queries are coming soon. That means that instead of just giving a center point and radius in your query, you can query with a polygon defined by arbitrary points and we will return your objects that exist inside that shape. Perhaps that could hold you over for the time being?

epaulson 14 years ago | | |

I want to do intersections of polygons - think "what neighborhoods have overlap with this political district." Many systems seem to have one but not the other, i.e. "store points, query by polygon", or "store polygons, query by point(and maybe radius)".

Storing polygons is probably key - if there's a query-by-radius or bounding box I can make an enclosing circle for my query and then do my own intersection tests with my query polygon.

greghinch 14 years ago |

With the demise of SimpleGeo this is a welcome addition, look forward to trying it out

jyaker5281 14 years ago |

Glad to see that you guys finally got that in. Nice work!

NickEubanks 14 years ago |

Congrats guys! Best of luck.