Pie Palace

My Lovely and I have decided to shack up. Neither of our current abodes are really two-person kinds of places, so we’re searching across Ottawa for somewhere nice to live. Our requirements are pretty simple: we want a place in Centretown or the Glebe, two bedrooms, within a certain price range, etc. I haven’t looked for a new place to live in about six years, so I was expecting it to be easy. I just thought that I would be able to ask Google. No such luck. There are plenty of rental companies around Ottawa, it’s just that their websites (a) suck, (b) aren’t cross linked, and (c) don’t provide much in the way of search capabilities.

So I started thinking about the problem from a software development perspective. The data we’re interested in a pretty simple. Each rental property should provide:

• Price (in dollars)
  
• Number of bedrooms (as an integer)
  
• Presence of washer on site (as a boolean)
  
• Presence of dryer on site (as a boolean)
  
• Textual description
  
• Optional square footage
  
• Type of property (house, divided house, apartment building, shack, etc)
  
• Approximate location (as a lat/long pair, with a possible range, or as an address)
  
• The URL of an online map, if the producer doesn’t want to expose the location
  
• Contact phone number
  
• Contact email address
  
• Zero or more links to photos of the property
  
• Zero or more links to VRML walkthoughs

Most of the attributes are trivial: they can be represented as attributes in something brain-dead like XML:

<property
    price=\"CAN$900\" bedrooms=\"3\" washer=\"yes\" type=\"dividedhouse\"
    contactphone=\"613.555.5555\" contactemail=\"foo@bar.com\"
>
    <img src=\"http://bar.com/img1.jpg\" alt=\"living room\" />
    The second floor of a wonderful Victorian manor,
    built directly on top of an old Indian graveyard.
</property>

Most XML parsers would pass the attributes of property as a hash table, meaning that parsing would be trivial. If each property management company published an XML file, they would be able to have their properties listed in a searchable format easily. The information is simple enough that it could be easily emitted by craigslist, or other listing organizations.

If this were 1999, I’d go looking for VC.