World Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Geospatial Data Needs: Enables rapid integration of country, state, city, currency, and timezone data for global applications (e.g., e-commerce, travel platforms, or logistics tools).
• Roadmap Acceleration: Reduces backend development time for features requiring hierarchical location data (e.g., multi-country support, localized pricing, or region-based filtering).
• Build vs. Buy: Avoids reinventing the wheel for maintaining and updating geospatial datasets, leveraging a pre-built, MIT-licensed solution.
• Use Cases:
  • User registration with country/state/city dropdowns.
  • Shipping/delivery address validation.
  • Multi-currency support tied to regions.
  • Analytics dashboards with geographic segmentation.

When to Consider This Package

• Adopt if: Your Laravel app needs structured, hierarchical geospatial data (countries/states/cities) with minimal setup, and you prioritize speed over customization.
• Look elsewhere if:
  • You require real-time updates (this is a static dataset; no live sync).
  • Your app needs granular sub-regions (e.g., neighborhoods, postal codes) beyond cities.
  • You’re using a non-Laravel stack (e.g., Django, Node.js).
  • You need advanced geospatial queries (e.g., distance calculations, polygons) – consider PostGIS or dedicated APIs like Google Maps.
  • The 15-minute seed time is prohibitive for your deployment pipeline (e.g., serverless environments).

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives: "This package cuts months of backend work to deliver global location data—countries, states, cities, currencies, and timezones—with a single Composer install. It’s MIT-licensed, actively maintained, and integrates seamlessly into Laravel apps, enabling faster launches for features like international shipping, localized pricing, or user registration. The trade-off? A static dataset (no real-time updates), but it’s a fraction of the cost of building or licensing alternatives."

For Engineering: *"eka/world provides a pre-seeded Laravel package with geospatial hierarchies (country → state → city) via a facade or API endpoints. Key benefits:

• Zero API calls: Data is stored locally after a one-time php artisan db:seed (~15min).
• Flexible queries: Filter by country code, search names, or fetch nested cities (e.g., states?country_code=US&fields=cities).
• Lightweight: ~50KB footprint; no external dependencies beyond Laravel.
• Extensible: MIT license allows forks/modifications if needed. Downside: Static data (update via composer update or manual DB refresh). Ideal for MVP phases or internal tools where freshness isn’t critical."*