#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 Most are outdated or incomplete.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.
#iSoc12 Firstsight: What is it all about
Hi everybody,
I’m François and I’m going to open the blog post festival by a short introduction of the Firstsight project, its history and and its goal.
Project’s history
Our project leader, Sacha Schmitz, is a student at Solvay Business School (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and started Firstsight as an educational project. He started from the idea that people are often afraid to get in touch with each other when they meet someone interesting.
This natural barrier can be avoided by using the new smartphones technologies to create re-meetings. This is the goal of the Firstsight project.
BeMyApp Belgium
To kickstart his project, Sacha decided to join the BeMyApp competition. The principle of the BeMyApp weekend is simple: people having innovative ideas but lacking developers skills to make them real, make a short pitch to present their ideas behind a panel of developers. After an initial voting, teams are being formed around the 5 most liked ideas and, in 48 hours, the application is being developed as far as possible.
At the end of the 48 hours, a jury of professionals selected the best application (which was in this case Firstsight) and we’ve been eligible for advantages like Microsoft Boostcamp and London Spring.
The idea in more details
Here’s a picture explaining the idea in more detail:
Conclusion
We hope the idea will seduce (and help to seduce) a lot of people; initially in Belgium, but after that hopefully also in the UK or the USA.
#iSoc12 We are Code9000
The iRail Summer of code event has started two days ago. We are very lucky that we can participate in this event and gain experience from the best. The atmosphere is very comfortable and fun.
The first day, also known as the kick-off, was very relaxed. We learned to know each other and the team. We learned about each other’s specialties, this way it’s easy to ask questions to the right person.
The second day started at Digipolis for us. This company takes care of the IT-infrastructure of the city of Ghent. They will follow-up on our progress on the Code9000 project. We met our mentors and we got a tour of the building, and afterwards we got an introduction on the project and the expectations.
Our goal is to develop a mobile app that has something to do with the city of Ghent to provide a better experience for any kind of people, which can vary from tourists to residents and employees. We have the freedom to come up with our own concepts. In order to get inspiration, we had the opportunity to talk with a lot of civil servants from different departments of the city this week. It was very inspiring and we already came up with a lot of ideas.
Tomorrow we have two meetings scheduled and at 4pm we will pitch our ideas. The city of Ghent, together with other supporting parties, will select the best concept.
Hopefully we can start our project by Friday because of the time pressure. We should be able to finish our project within the coming two weeks. So probably we’ll have to work hard to deliver a cool project. We are very motivated and eager to learn new things from our colleagues.
One thing is sure, the time at iSoc will be awesome!
Sam, Nicolas, Lieven (the Code 9000 team)
This post was also published on Apps For Ghent.
#iSoc12 The hackathon
On the second day of iSoc, we held a hackathon. All of the steps the teams will be going through in three weeks — all in one day! Why not?
The iSoc students, coding away during the hackathon.
Since the data of the Gentse Feesten have recently become available, the iSoc students were teamed up into four teams to write an app for the Gentse Feesten.
- Team 1: Dimitri, Michael, Jeppe, Jeroen
GF12 Planner: planning your route - The FirstSight team: Sacha, Laurens, François
GentseReet is saving your ass: real-time ratings of Gentse Feesten concerts/events - The Mobile Vikings team: Hannes, Koen, Lennart
PartySlider: visualisation - The FlatTurtle team: Jens, Nik, Glenn
LocoGent: Foursquare integration
Thanks to Miet for the logos, and thanks to Jan for the webservice.
An external jury, consisting of Ann Bernaert (Digipolis), Bart Rosseau (city of Ghent), Sander Van der Maelen (The Reference), Stéphane Roelandt (OKFN), Tim Besard (iRail member) and Stijn Delbeke (expert by experience) judged the four apps. They took into consideration criteria such as marketing plan, information architecture, design, coding, …
Hannes presents the PartySlider app, by the Mobile Vikings team.
Congratulations to the winner, Loco Gent! All criteria were thought about, but ultimately, the jury also considered which app they would actually use. Well done! You can also read about the experiences of Jens, the team leader of the winning team.
#iSoc12 The kick-off
Finally, it is July and the iRail Summer of code has officially begun! On Monday, we welcomed all the iSoc participants and everyone introduced themselves. Pieter gave a talk about iRail in general and a short history of the iRail npo, all the projects we will be working on were presented:
- FirstSight.be
- Mobile Vikings
- FlatTurtle
- Code 9000
- The DataTank
- Go-Mobile
- Circadia
- Ontoforce
- iRail 3.0
More info on these projects will follow soon!
In the afternoon, Jens gave a lesson about Git, which we will be using for code sharing and version control. We went over the planning for day 2 (the hackathon) and the teams already started planning out some ideas for that, but more on that in the next blogpost!
Greet giving an introductory speech on the first day of iSoc.
The FirstSight.be team: Laurens, Sacha and François.