Question

What simple tools would you recommend to read a text file of addresses, send each record separately to a web service for geocoding, and save the batch of results as a text file?

Looking for no-frills component(s) with usage examples, for minimal code-from-scratch. Language irrelevant as long as dev environment is easy to install.

Requirements
– usable by unsophisticated programmer
– low or no cost
– runs under Windows.

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Second thought:
How easy would this be to do inside a browser using JavaScript and a library or two?

Answer 1

I’d go for Java and use a flat file parsing library like jFFP or Flatworm
These libraries are pretty easy to understand and to use (I’ve worked with both of them in the past) and they both provide code samples.

Spring Integration would be another good option but the learning curve might be too big if you are not familiar with Spring and it might be overkill for your simple workflow.

Actually, in your case, I think I’d choose Flatworm for the parsing. You’ll find code samples on its website or in How to read and parse flat files in Java. And you could even use it to write your output file like in Writing flat files in Java with Flatworm).

For the SOAP part, I’d use the JAX-WS Reference Implementation (which is included in the JDK 6 so you won’t have to add any library if you are using Java 6) and Netbeans IDE. Netbeans IDE has very good support for developing JAX-WS Web Services Client (or here for later versions of Netbeans) and should really ease the process. Once the various classes generated, calling the web service is a matter of 3 lines of code as shown in the examples of the provided links:

// Call Web Service Operation
com.cdyne.ws.Check service = new com.cdyne.ws.Check();
com.cdyne.ws.CheckSoap port = service.getCheckSoap();

// TODO initialize WS operation arguments here
java.lang.String bodyText = "";
java.lang.String licenseKey = "";

// TODO process result here
com.cdyne.ws.DocumentSummary result = port.checkTextBody(bodyText, licenseKey);