Perfecting the Basic Node.js App

I didn't like the forecast.io since it doesn't let you enter zip codes (and asks for latitude and longitude instead). So I used wunderground's API and just adapted what we did in Chalkers' Node basics course:

var http = require("http");
//print out message
function printMsg(city, temp) {
  var msg = "The forecast for " + city + " is " + temp;
  console.log(msg);
}
//print out error message
function printError(error) {
    console.error('Problem with request: ' + error.message);
}
function get(zip) {
  //connect to api url 
  var request = http.get("http://api.wunderground.com/api/YourKey/forecast/geolookup/condiitons/q/" + zip + ".json", function(response){
    var body = "";
    //read the data
    response.on('data', function(chunk) {
      body += chunk;
    });
    response.on('end', function(){
        //console.log(body);
        if(response.statusCode ===200){
            try {
        //parse the data (read the data from a string in a program friendly way
            var profile = JSON.parse(body);
        //print out the data
            printMsg(profile.location.city, profile.forecast.txt_forecast.forecastday[0].fcttext);
        } catch(error) {
            //handling a parse error
            printError(error);
        }
    } else {
        //handling status code error
        printError({message: "There was an error getting a profile for " + zip + ". (" + http.STATUS_CODES[response.statusCode] +")"});
    }
    });
  });
  //Connection Error
  request.on('error', printError);
}                           

module.exports.get = get;

And then in a separate file:

var forecast = require("./weather");
var cities = process.argv.slice(2);
cities.forEach(forecast.get);

This should allow you to create a query like so: "node forecast.js 10029" and get a forecast for the next few hours.

Here is mine. I used my own data set of zip codes to make the conversion to coordinates before passing it to forecast.io.

There is much room for improvement and expansion.

Flags would be nice (ex. --week to get weekly forcast, --daily to receive daily, -c for current);

https://github.com/sethshober/node-weather

Keep at it you two!

Has anybody found an API that actually takes a zip code? Here's a CSV of all zip codes in the US with latitude/longitude coordinates you can then pass to any weather API. Just use the csvtojson module from NPM to convert the data to JSON.

I wrote a function that takes a zipcode and checks it to the data we now have stored. I ran a for loop to match the zip code and grab its coordinates. Hopefully this helps for now.

//TAKE A ZIP CODE AND CHECK IT WITH ZIP CODE JSON DATA
function getZipCoordinates(zip,data) {
    //search for zip code
    for(var i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
        var zipObj = data[i];
        //if we have a match
        if(zipObj.zipcode === zip){

            //show me the coordinates as well as the matching object
            var lat = zipObj.latitude;
            var lon = zipObj.longitude;
            console.log("latitude: " + lat);
            console.log("longitude: " + lon);
            console.log(zipObj);

            //lets do some AJAX now         
            var url = "https://api.forecast.io/forecast/APIKEY/"+ lat + "," + lon;

            //write your ajax call here

            break; //stop the loop since we've got what we need
        }
    }
}

ExchangeRate Apps I have used yahoo query language api to build the exchange rate app(not stock app suggested though). And still not factorized at this moment, just wrap it all up by all the techniques learned in this course. Thank you very much chalkers!

The app need to pass in argv in pairs of currency.

Example:

node app.js usdcny eurusd

I didn't see anybody get this yet, so I tried it and created an example one with the Zip Code input to find the weather for that given location. Instead of the csv file, and parsing through it, you can use the Google Maps API for Geocoding to accomplish that. There is a node module available for it which I added link for in the code comments. There's really no error catching, and you can only enter one Zip Code at the moment, so those are things you could explore to enhance the application.

https://github.com/rakistner5124/Forecast

Awesome! :)