Currently, the Georgia General Assembly is required to publish information about votes, bills, and membership on their website. For awhile now this information has been published through a WSDL API that allows access to this information, but only if you knew someone who had the URLs, if you can find a SOAP client that can read it successfully (several I tried failed at first), and if you really want to deal with a SOAP API.
This application deals with the hard stuff for you.
I got the WSDL API working inside an Express application. We're still implementing the guts that will allow us to import information from the GGA website, but all the SOAP clients for the various services are being created successfully.
The goal of this project is twofold:
- Expose a RESTful API somewhere in the cloud for this information. Using WSDL sucks. It's time consuming to get set up, and not really geared for quick scripts or good language semantics on the client code. So, we're going to open up a REST API into the data we import via WSDL. We deal with the nasty. You use a beautiful REST API to build your website or application. It will make your code nicer, and will save you a lot of time dealing with SOAP and WSDL.
- Make it dead easy to use on your server. I plan to enable a mode for this app that runs without exposing the API. If your site becomes epicly popular and you need some serious speed - including all the data hosted locally, you should be able to just spin up a copy of this project on your server hooked up to your database. The one trade-off here is that it's licensed under the AGPL. If you improve it you have to share with the rest of us!
You can get access to this API by either using the hosted API, or by running a copy of this service on your personal computer or server.
Hosted API: There is currently a hosted version of this API living on one of my servers at gga.apis.gaodp.org. You should be able to start making requests against it as you wish without any trouble.
Run on your computer: To get started, you'll need a few things:
If you're using a Mac, just install XCode, homebrew, then run this command from your terminal:
$ brew install node mongodb redis
... and follow any instructions neccicary to get mongo and redis running at boot. If this all sounds like greek to you, please scroll up to the instructions on using the CloudAPI. :)
Our project wiki contains the full documentation for how to use the RESTful API. (Or how you will use it when it is finished.) Please page through what's available there for information on how this whole things works.
My name is Matt Farmer. I'm a code bandit currently slinging code on behalf of Elemica, Anchor Tab, the Lift Framework, and a few other small outfits who are out to make the world a better place. I tweet regularly, and blog and little bit less so.