GeoNames Forum

i've done a free and open source framework that provides access to gisfeature
from several gazeteers on the Web (mainly Geonames, but not only : ESRI for instance). It provides an importer to inject the data into a strongly typed Postgres / Postgis database and use them via 2 webservices or a java API : geolocalisation and fulltext. Here are the main functionalities :

REST WebService
Full text search Lucene / Solr with default filters optimized for city search
(case insensitivity, separator characters stripping, ..) via an Java API or a webservice
Fully replicated / scalable / high performance / cached services
Findnearby function (with limits, pagination, restrict to a specific country and/or language and other useful options) via a Java API or a Web Service
Search for zipcode or name
Importers from geonames CSV files, reporting of inconsistencies and a report when import is complete. Just give the country(ies) you wish to import and / or the placetypes, and it download the files and import them with all the alternateNames (optional), and sync the database with the fulltext search engine
Several output formats supported : json, XML, ruby, python,...
Dojo widgets / prototype / Ajax to ease search but can be use it even if javascript is not enabled on the client side
Plateform / language independent
Provides all the countries flags in svg and png format

A little bit of technics...
Spring Services / Hibernate mapping with its own hibernate dialect
Lucene Schema
Use Postgres / postgis but will be soon compliant with other Spatial providers (Oracle, Mysql,...)
Build using Maven2
Automatic synchronization between Postgres and Solr
High test coverage
Event - based design
UTF-8 all over the place
it has its own maven repository with all the dependencies
Designed with <a href="http://www.infoq.com/articles/internal-dsls-java">DSL</a> (Domain Specific Language)
Designed with the DDD paradigm

it will be available in the middle of june, everything is developped. i currently writing docs, finalize it. and make a site

I tried to find the geonames library in your maven repository, but couldn't see it - is it available from elsewhere?

The jar file for the client is up on repo*.maven.org. Thanks to whoever got that going!

It would be great to keep it updated, as the geonames lib is up to 1.0.4 now. Whoever is doing this, please update, and if you don't want to do it anymore then let us know so we can figure out a replacement.

Thank you again!