I'm not asking for anyone to build me an app.
I just need some tips on getting started.
So what I wanted to do:
be able to map some routes/directions, similar to what Google Maps already has regarding the local transit in a city.
Why? Because Google's database is a bit outdated, first. Second, because I want to create a local database with the routes and with the stations. Unfortunately, I can't really do that using Google Maps and I think Leaflet could help me with this much better. This would've been a web app, where someone with an account could add/edit/delete the routes.
create an Android app that :
a) sees the routes, allows an user to find the closest path to get from point A to B using only the routes I have in my database, sort by tram/bus etc
b) allows the user to mark a location and say something like "bus no 37 was here at hour:minute:second" - this would appear for anyone else that is using the app, similar to what another app lets you do this for police cars and traffic jams
c) extra: allow users to input some data so that my app could also give predictions; for example, someone inputs it took 10m50s to get from point X to point Y on route Z. That remains in a database and then someone else inputs some data for the same path...i would create some algorithm that could get predictions on where would a bus be now if someone marked it at Station 'bla' 5 minutes ago. I know, I know, this might be pretty hard, and it would be pretty inaccurate, I should consider the time of day, but it would just be something small, as an extra. Also, would be cool if this stuff could be added automatically: like the user sets the route he's on, starts "recording", then stops it when he gets off the vehicle and the time and locations are automatically taken into consideration.
Hope you understand what I have in my mind.
Thing is, what would you recommend?
I know Java, Spring MVC and a bit of Android. JavaScript, HTML and CSS won't be a problem. I need to combine these. If I will use Leaflet, as far as I can find, I won't really be able to use it in an Android APP, I would have to create a web app. At the same time, Google Maps doesn't really let me do what I want for my "personal" database. I can't even create decent custom routes by adding waypoints because parts of the Tramway Line aren't on streets with car access. ALso, would you think this is easier/better to do as an Android app or as a web app? I'm kinda new to Android.
I hope this isn't an unsuitable thing to ask on stackoverflow.
I'm open to any ideas.
allows an user to find the closest path to get from point A to B using only the routes I have in my database, sort by tram/bus etc
Routing is hard. Multi-modal routing (tram+bus+car+walking+cycle) even more so. See pgRouting and Valhalla. If you're going to do anything with public transport, then you'll have to deal with GTFS too.
Research into OpenTripPlanner also, as there are several actors developing some similar platforms.
I hope this isn't an unsuitable thing to ask on stackoverflow.
I'm afraid it kinda is - see https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic, point 4.
Related
I am developing an app which will give you nearby Mosques within 10 km of your current location. Now that the Places API allows a certain number of queries per day, I have used firebase to store nearby Mosques for a certain location and I first check if the data is in database or not before querying. But this still doesn't solve the problem. e.g. if a user is on the go the whole day then the results must be changing every single minute, according to his/her location. How can I achieve the desirable results?
As mentioned earlier, I am saving nearby locations in a database with their relative location (around which they exist). But this doesn't quite solve the problem.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Places API is a commercial offering - you are meant to pay for using it, if you want to make applications around it.
There's a certain small number of calls that you can do for free, but this is only meant as testing grounds or private use. I am no lawyer, but I would guess that circumventing the fee by scraping the map (like setting a bot to go around a country to build a database of points of interests) would be illegal and would probably get you a letter from Google saying you should stop.
Use AutocompleteSessionToken class to generate a token and place it after your key , this token will reduce your usage because you can request the places api multiple times and still it will be considered as a single request. i hope this will help cause i didnt get your question very well. here is sample of the link:
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/autocomplete/json?input=1600+Amphitheatre&key=&sessiontoken=1234567890.
For more details.see here
I'm currently working on a native Android app for my company and ran into some problems with Salesforce lately.
I hope I can find some help here.
What I want to achieve:
The company has a lot of Accounts in Salesforce with 3 important fields for the app: Name, Business (Workshop or Parts Dealer) and location(latitude, longitude)
I would like to show those Accounts(Workshops/Parts Dealers) as markers on a google map in my Android app based on a radius around the user's current location. So it would be more than sufficient to get the data as JSON or XML(i read about sObjects, which would be nice too)
The app will be freely available on Google Play Store and every user should be able to see all the Workshops/Parts dealers around the world.
The problem I'm facing is that I can't find a way to fetch the data inside my app without authenticating every user with a Salesforce-Login.
Which API is the best to use in this case?
It would be so awesome if anybody could help me with this problem.
What I tried so far:
- SalesforceMobileSDK: If i extend SalesForceApplication() i always end up with the Salesforce-Login Screen.
It seems that every client has to be authenticated for API-calls to work. I tried using the method peekUnauthenticatedRestClient(), but this method only works on full path URL's(e.g. "https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=James%20Brown&type=artist"), which isn't really practical for my Use-case.
I feel like I read nearly all docs about salesforce API, but can't quite get my head around how to solve this problem, although it seems like to be a pretty common use-case.
would a salesforce-apex method which would select all records inside a set radius around the user's location to be accessible without authentication?
Thanks for your help in advance!
Roman
Try asking on salesforce.stackexchange.com. Your question is more about licensing model than a particular programming problem. It might even be the case that you don't really need Salesforce for your project, you'd be better off on Heroku (even free tier) if the login piece is an issue...
All Salesforce APIs require some form of authentication. If you're positive you don't want to hardcode "Integration user" credentials in the app and you don't want to pay for (self-)registered user licenses in your org...
Try to read about these:
Site - piece of Visualforce running under specific "guest user", letting you view & interact with SF data without having to log in. You expose SF data to the world but that means it's your job to handle security (if any) and craft the API. You want to really display the data to human? Or just return JSON content or what...
Sites are meant to be displayin some incentive to contact you. Your product catalog / basic order form. Some map of nearby locations. Maybe a "contact us" form. There's limit on the traffic so eventually they'll explode as your app gets popular:
Customer Community - typically you need named licenses (even if they're fairly cheap) to let your customers log in to your SF. You create a Contact, click magic button - boom, this Contact now has a real matching User record with its own license. Think of it as some kind of step up from Sites - it'll still have some limits but will offer more than just raw API access and you'll have better control on what's going on.
I don't know if this is the place to ask the question but I 'll give it a go anyway. I'm looking for a web based service that can replace TMC over FM. I'm currently working on distance matrix between multiple points (>1000) and would like to take in account the real time traffic data. I know that google maps and tom tom have the data but I'm looking for other serviceses as well (open source would be lovelly). I hope you guy's can help me out.
i want to build a weather app and i have some problems.
my big problems is places names! you know, i want that user find his location with two ways. with GPS and by searching. but my problem is that place names. how can find a database from whole places in the world?!
is it good idea that i store them in a database in my server? or there is some services that provide this functionality? if i have to create my own database how i can create a database like that. is there a database with city names and latitude/ longitude and other information? if a new location created how i can add it to the system? by hand?
the second problem is that after catching the city name how i can find that locations latitude/ longitude? it seems google has a Geocoder service but i don't know how it works. please help me. i just want to select a city name and find related coordinates...
The Google Maps API provides you with Geocoding, which allows you to turn strings like 'Santiago, Chile' or 'New York', into proper latitude/longitude coordinates. So in your code, you should perform an HTTP GET request to a URL like this one:
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Santiago,+Chile&sensor=true
And it returns a JSON object with a properly formatted address along with latitude and longitude information of the place you were looking up.
It's explained very thoroughly in the Google Maps API Geocoder documentation, so you should probably take a look at that. I'm no expert in Android development, but there should be some library that allows you to easily access what the Maps API has to offer in a clean way.
Maps API also provides you with a solution for Place Searching, and even input autocompletion, but all the examples I see are on JavaScript/HTML, so I'm not completely sure if there's an alternative in plain Java/Android to what you're trying to do. Nevertheless, you should take a look at basic place searching and place search autocompletion so you get a general sense of how it works.
There's an entire section in the Google Developers website dedicated to the Maps API on Android, so make sure to take a look at that aswell and you might find more useful information - sadly I have no experience with Android whatsoever so I can't really point you in any direction.
Good luck!
You could use the Google Maps Geocoding API. Querying coordinates returns a JSON response containing the current location in multiple levels of detail that you could parse.
E.g. for the position lat:40.714224 long: -73.961452, the query URL would look like the following:
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=40.714224,-73.961452&sensor=false
The result now contains the city and country, beside much more.
You can find more information on the API here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/
You could also try http://openweathermap.org/
I haven't used this extensively but I tried it enough that I know it works. It lets you query by location name or geographic coordinates, and the city name is included in the responses along with plenty of other data.
http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?lat=xx&lon=xx returns a weather object with city name & related data. API key is even optional so you can try it out very quickly.
I am working with GTFS format.I have a concern for example consider a little complex network where a user want to travel from a source 'A' to Destination 'B' and actually there exist no direct route from A to B.But we can reach B from A thru a stop C. i cant see a way mentioned in GTFS to know that there exist some route to reach B in our example(A->c->B). Do i miss something here? or there is no way to do that but to implement our own algo? or is some third party already implemented the algo in java (i believe someone did it ;) ).
Thanks in advance.
Cheers
Sriram.
PS:As i am unable to create new tags hence i have the transport,java tag (not gtfs or something similar to that)
Well GTFS does not help in identifying paths across different routes and this has to be done on fly.
As Sriram's answer from 4.5 years ago notes, GTFS does not attempt to represent all possible paths through a transit network. OpenTripPlanner is an open-source project that tries to solve this problem in the general case: http://www.opentripplanner.org/. OTP uses GTFS as its primary schedule input.