Outsourcing Consulting News
Geospacial Travel Planning Application
Customer
The client is a California based company which is the leading provider of advanced and comprehensive geospatial software platforms for today's cutting-edge Internet, mobile, personal navigation and enterprise location-based service (LBS) applications. Their technology is a crucial link in the LBS value chain as it extends from base map data and content through to the application, service provider and on to the end-user.
Business Case
The client was looking for an offshore partner to develop a location based service which would consist of a web based client application and a mobile client application. The client side application had to be developed for mobile devices (Blackberry Curve & Moto Q). The main feature was to alert users when points of interest that matched predefined user-selected search criteria would appear within a specified distance of his/her current location. Solovatsoft was given the project because of the extensive experience in web and mobile development and a track record of completing projects on time and budget.
Solution
Solovatsoft developed an application that does the following:
- Allows users of the system to add and edit points of interest, as well as to rate them;
- Client applications (mobile & web) have an interface for showing maps with points of interest on the map;
- With the mobile application a user can step between different points of interest shown on the current map; Once on a given points of interest the user can then view information about each of them on a different screen. The mobile client includes a zooming function & ability to pan the map in all directions.
- The web client application allows additional functionality: trip planning, advanced points of interest searching, sharing of reviews & various other features.
Features
TravelDiary is composite application made of Web Application and Client deployed on the mobile device which having the following major components:
-
TripPlanner » component deployed on Web Server and available to user through Web Interface (may be considered as stand-alone Web application);
-
Scheduler » component that may be deployed either on Web Server or on Mobile client or on both, validates schedules and activates LocationChecker upon specified date/time;
-
LocationChecker » this component periodically polls out GPS (or another available within specified location detection precision) service and validates if any of pre-defined POI are within the specified range;
-
LocationMapBuilder » composes map of location with highlighting of POIs and user's current location. Provides zoom in/zoom out and map re-positioning features;
-
Geocoder » component that communicates with provider of GeoSpatial data, defines location of specified POIs and route between current location and selected POI;
-
Authentication, authorization and navigation framework » component deployed on Web server and securing users' access to the Web application resources;
-
Service and Application Administration » components engaged in internal services, such as Custom POI lists loading and parsing, devices registration and administration, etc.
Tools and Technologies
J2EE/J2ME, JavaScript, AJAX, XML, Yelp API, Wikipedia API, MySQL, BlackBerry Sync Server SDK, Codewarrior 9.3, NetBeans IDE, NetBeans Mobility Pack, BlackBerry JDE 4.2.1, SQLite, Eclipse SDK 3.3.1