#iSoc12 iRail 3.0
Hello, I am Koen and our team is working on iRail 3.0. We are:
– Hannes Van De Vreken (Project Manager)
– Lennart Martens
– Koen De Groote
– Jens Segers
iRail 3.0 is an ambitious project to update the existing iRail application.
Currently, iRail looks like this: http://irail.be/route/
It’s a stable application used daily by more than 5000 users.
Our goal is to bring the app to the next level. Beyond today’s basic application, we work to offer integration with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Vikingspots.
To do this, we’re working on making an identity manager for iRail, which will be the behind-the-scenes app that links you to these services. You’ll be able to use any of these services to let people know what you’re doing, where you’re going and how late your train is going to be. And if you have to wait for your train to arrive, you’ll be able to look up interesting spots near your location.
To do this, we’re implementing our own authentication server in PHP, building on the Oauth2 specification. Oauth2 is currently still a draft (version 28 at the time of writing) and finding existing implementations is proving to be very hard. Most are outdated or incomplete.
We’ve moved focus to working out the interaction with the Bouncy Castle services we’ll need. We’re finding a lot of code out there and are working out the best way to implement our services. The code we encounter teaches us things about working with these sites and their APIs. Just now, we finished a small Twitter app which can do all the basic interactions. This Summer of code is giving us a lot to think about and work on.
