gabekessler/whats_the_weather

What's the Weather?

What's the Weather is a an app that returns the temperature and weather forecast from an address. It's written with Ruby on Rails and the only extra gems installed are:

• geocoder - for getting the latitude and longitude from the Address street and zipcode.
• httparty - for making api calls to the weather service to return forecast and temperature.
• pry - for looking at the guts.

How it works

1. The action starts for What's the Weather when the user fills out an address form.
2. Rails handles the @address object as normal.
3. The AddressController calls a service object which determines which adapter (currently, UsWeatherAdapter) will get the weather data
4. Address#create takes the data from the service object to build a weather instance for the address
5. On successful save, address and weather are then displayed on the Address#show page along with a form for a new address.
6. A 30 minute cookie is used to store recent addresses' zipcodes which points to their weather forecast and toggles a "recent" badge on the UI
7. This app only uses Address#new, Address#show and Address#create actions for the user facing pages. All the others are reserved for admin duties.

How the UsWeatherAdapter works

1. User fills out the form

2. The address zipcode and street are used to get the address latitude and longitude.

    before_validation :geocode
   

3. The latitude and longitude are used to call an API to get the data needed to get weather area coordinates

    HTTParty.get("https://api.weather.gov/points/#{lat_lang.first},#{lat_lang.last}", headers: { 
            "Accept" => "application/json" 
        })
   

4. The coordinates are used to get the weather data to populate a weather instance

    HTTParty.get("https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/#{grid["cwa"]}/#{grid["gridX"]},#{grid["gridY"]}/forecast", headers: { 
            "Accept" => "application/json" 
        })
   

5. The output is a hash: { temperature: Integer, forecast: String }

The Future!

1. An adapter is used that calls the weather.gov API which is US only, so future adapters can be added for international addresses.
2. Rails scaffold was used to create the Address class. This is so the unused actions will be in place for implementing an adminstration area.
3. Presenters are used to make messages to the UI as close to final form as possible to facilitate adding a frontend framework.
4. Internationalization & Accessbility!

Technical Details

• Ruby version: 3.0.0
• Rails version: 7.0.4.2
• Bootstrap version: 5.3.0

Known Issues

• Some bogus addresses are generating geocode lat/long which results in a weather association with adapter that results as an Integer instead of a Hash. This causes Address#create to fail.