Build a Grails App With Geolocation in 3 Steps

A new Grails Geolocation plugin features support for the HTML5 Geolocation spec.  In just 3 simple steps, this tutorial will show you how to use that plugin to add Geolocation into your own web app.  


These 3 steps will essentially allow you to add location-sensitive behavior to your app which enables the retrieval of a user's current position so that it may be put into the session. The 3 steps are as follows:

1. Install the plugin - "grails install-plugin geolocation"
2. Add the <geolocation:resources/> tag in the head section of the page that you want to be locationally-aware
3. Add the <geolocation:locateMe/> tag in the body section of that same page

The Geoposition instance will be available in the session as soon as the user declares that they want to share their location:

From gsp inside a JavaScript function

var latlng = new google.maps.LatLng(${session.position.coords.latitude},${session.position.coords.longitude});

From a controller

def position = session['position']

The test page in the plugin can test the application's accuracy with a google map widget once the user's location is known.  Just enter:

your_app_name/geolocation/showMap

These are the domain classes:

Geoposition.groovy

package org.grails.plugins.geolocation

import org.grails.plugins.geolocation.Coordinates;

class GeoPosition {
	Coordinates coords
	long timestamp
    static constraints = {
    }
}

Coordinates.groovy

package org.grails.plugins.geolocation

import org.grails.plugins.geolocation.GeoPosition;

class Coordinates {
GeoPosition position
    static constraints = {
      latitude(nullable:true)
      longitude(nullable:true)
      altitude(nullable:true)
      accuracy(nullable:true)
      altitudeAccuracy(nullable:true)
      heading(nullable:true)
      speed(nullable:true)
    }
    double latitude
    double longitude
    double altitude
    double accuracy
    double altitudeAccuracy
    double heading
    double speed 
 static belongsTo = GeoPosition
}

The applications developed using this plugin have been successfully run on iPhone Safari, Safari 5.0 (slower), and Firefox 3.5+.  Some browsers like Android still haven't been tested yet.

You can download the source code from the link provided in the first paragraph, or from GitHub.