This tutorial will show you how to create a mashup of three different APIs including integration with Google Maps. This idea came about when I was searching through ProgrammableWeb’s API directory for a couple APIs that complimented each other enough that I could use one to provide the other with data. What I came up with will be known as the “Beer Mashup”.

Step 1. API Discovery

While looking through ProgrammableWeb’s directory, I found an IP geolocating tool called ipLoc. It simply accepts in an IP address and returns relevant location-specific data on it such as it’s state, city, country, postal code, etc.

I then found the very cool Beer Mapping Project, which has a huge directory of bars and pubs from not only across the US, but many other countries as well. Instantly I noticed that this was a perfect compliment to ipLoc because the BeerMapping API requires a city (which we can get from the ipLoc API) to return a list of local bars and pubs.

Lastly, I also wanted to integrate Google Maps into this mashup to plot out the addresses of the bars and pubs to add a bit of interactivity to the page instead of just displaying each bar in a simple HTML list.

Step 2. Variable Initialization

I usually find it best to start PHP documents off with some of the variables that I want to set globally within the script. Here I add a line that silences PHP warning messages (Google Maps spits out many of these if you happen to try to map an invalid address) and my BeerMashup and Google Maps API keys. We will end up using these API keys when we get to their respective steps below.

<?php
	error_reporting(E_ERROR|E_PARSE);  //Silence Errors

//Initialize Variables
	$beer_api = 'YOUR_BEERMAPPING_API_KEY';
	$gmaps_api = 'YOUR_GOOGLEMAPS_API_KEY';

Step 3. IP Geolocation Setup

The ipLoc API allows you to either specify an IP address to get data on, or use the default IP address that the script finds.

Default Version: http://iploc.mwudka.com/iploc/json/
Static Version (IP address is hardcoded): http://iploc.mwudka.com/iploc/68.162.155.110/json/

//Set Location
	//Visitor IP Address
	$ip = getenv("REMOTE_ADDR");

	//via IPLoc
	$iploc = file_get_contents("http://iploc.mwudka.com/iploc/$ip/json/");  //Format: JSON
	$ipdata = json_decode($iploc, true);

After a little testing, I realized that the default version of the ipLoc API was finding the location (Scottsdale, AZ, USA) of my hosting provider’s server rather than my home computer’s IP location (Pittsburgh, PA, USA). To circumvent this, I decided to use the static IP version of the API (Line 2 above) and passed in the IP address that is detected by the getenv(”REMOTE_ADDR”) php variable.

After checking if the data has been successfully returned as a decoded json formatted string, we need to extract only the specific data we want to pass to the BeerMapping API, which is the city and state.

	// Error checking
	if ($ipdata['city']) {
		$city = $ipdata['city'];
		$state = $ipdata['region'];
		$location = $city .", ". $state;
	} else {
		$err = "No location data returned for your IP address: ". $ip; 

	}

Step 4. Integrating Google Maps

This step needs to be done now because the next step will add the location points to Google Maps â