Access your Google Latitude position from PHP

The code to access your Google Latitude position is even simpler in PHP than it is in .Net :

<?PHP
header('Content-Type: text/plain');
 
$userId = '5616045291659744796';
 
if ( $_GET['user'] ) {
	if ( is_numeric( $_GET['user'] ) )
		$userId = $_GET['user'];
	else
		exit('This isn\'t a valid user id.');
}
 
$url = 'http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user='.$userId.'&type=json';
 
// We get the content
$content = file_get_contents( $url );
 
// We convert the JSON to an object
$json = json_decode( $content );
 
$coord = $json->features[0]->geometry->coordinates;
$timeStamp = $json->features[0]->properties->timeStamp;
 
if ( ! $coord ) 
	exit('This user doesn\'t exist.');
 
$date = date( 'd/m/Y H:i:s', $timeStamp );
$lat = $coord[1];
$lon = $coord[0];
 
echo $date.' : '.$lat.' x '.$lon;
?>

This program is available for testing here. It requires PHP 5.2.0 to run the json_decode method.

I think this is the power of PHP, you can make some powerful code in no time. The drawback is that it’s really slow, and it becomes even slower if you begin to use heavy objects (and objects are often heavy). And I personally think it’s much easier and safer to debug and maintain complex .Net programs than complex PHP programs.

By the way, you can generate your google badge userid that you can then use for the API here. (thank you Neavilag for this comment)