Is it free?

Yes! There is no desire or intention to charge for the use of LCBO API. I don't own the data, and neither do you.

Where does the data come from?

The LCBO's website is crawled in the early hours of the morning to get up-to-date information. Search engines like Google use this same technique to index web pages.

Why did you do this?

I want to see what developers create with access to this data. I feel that publicly available information should be free and accessible in as many ways as possible.

How does it work?

• Ruby
• Sinatra
• Sequel
• Rack::Cache with Memcached
• SQLite3 with FTS3
• Haversine (Store distances)
• Amatch::Levenshtein (Search suggestion)
• Google Maps Geo API
• Passenger
• Slicehost (512 MB)

SQLite, really?

Yep, do your homework before you gonna hate.

Is it open source?

Some parts are, but the meat of the project is still closed source. The intention is that everything from the crawler to the web frontend will be open source in the future.