Gianluca Panici

inPlace: a mobile application for geolocated messages

Project for the course of Mobile Applications and Cloud Computing. In this project a set of requirements was given and we had to develop a mobile application to satisfy them. Precisely, the application was required to involve the use of APIs, to rely on already existent cloud platforms and also on an service built by the student. More, the application has to be a multi-user application and also had to use sensors.

So I thought about inPlace: in this application the user can send messages and only read messages that have been sent in their area by other users. Each message is sent with a GPS position tag, so that messages can be filtered according to user's position. Firebase is responsible for the messages storing and to manage the authentication process. On the other hand, a server built by myself is running on pythonanywhere. This server periodically gets all the messages and compute some clusters, indicating some hot spots where there is an high concentration of messages.

The client application gets the clusters through a CRUD interface exposed by the server and then provides the user a compass that points both to the north and towards the nearest cluster.

More than a beautiful and graphically well designed application, inPlace is an exercise to build a complex system from zero to hero, where I learned how to cope with new problems and challenges.

MORE