Calling Geolocation and Geocoding Services From the Browser

One of the attractions of APIs (Appllication Progamming Interfaces) is that you can call them from a wide variety of programming environments.

The web browser is one such environment. Calls are made to online webservices using Javascript, which typically respond using JSON, the Javascript Object Notation. This JSON data is processed by further Javascript code and used to customise the HTML markup that is rendered by your browser.

This web page provides several working examples of how geolocation services can be accessed from the browser.

Click the Browser geolocate... button to get your coordinates from the browser location service.

You will need to grant the browser permission to use location services. Note this is a "black box" lookup - you don't get to see what information the browser passes to the geolocation lookup service.

Enter an address to try the Google Maps API geocoder:

Get random postcode: Use random postcode

Enter a postcode to try the postcodes.io API geocoder:

Enter latitide and longitude in the form LATITUDE,LONGITUDE to try the postcodes.io API reverse geocoder:

IP based geolookup