Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Chapter
Using Cloud Services:
A Transport Application
Mastering the basics of geolocation is all well and good, and as we learned in Chapter 9,
we can have fun working with our coordinates. A huge range of possibilities opens up
once we know where we are, and what other services are available to mix our location
information with other data. In this chapter, we're going to take our geolocation know-
how, and mix in some local searching capabilities, to build a personalized transit
application.
Our example transit application will find where you are, and then search for your nearest
transit options, be it a bus stop, a subway or train station, or even an airport. With the
basics in place, you'll be able to extend our transit application to pretty much any
search-plus-location problem.
As a developer, you have many options for how much or how little work you want to do
when blending web- or cloud-based services with your own applications. You have a
choice of building your own services using publicly available data feeds, using a full
service, or building a hybrid. Using a full service would give us nothing to talk about in
this chapter, so we have opted for a hybrid approach, where we'll then use our
geolocation know-how to use a standard search service to provide useful transit
information.
Before we dive into code, examples, and explanations, consider for a minute the various
building blocks you probably already use, but may not actively think about. When
building any kind of transport or transit application, we want to combine knowledge and
data then to present some useful options to the user. These would include:
Who am I ?
In a way, it can be useful to think of "who" is using your
application as a combination of the actual user, and the device they are
using along with its capabilities. We'll be reusing the detection code we
covered in Chapter 9 to determine if a device supports geolocation.
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