The problem that we are trying to solve with this project is the lack of personalized and easy-to-follow travel guides that are available online. To address this issue, our main goal is to provide a platform for creating and sharing audio guides with tourists, all for free.
The project enables users, in the status of content-creators, to create and share travel guides in audio format. The guides include a photo, a short description and an audio file. They are also linked to a place on google maps. The creator can specify if a guide is private or public.
The travellers can search for guides in the area of their next destination, and they can listen to the audio guides.
The users may have a public portfolio, which includes all the guides created by them and some information about the user(name, a self-introduction and a profile picture).
For Googlers only: demo
For developing the project we used the following technologies:
- AppEngine on Google Cloud for testing and deployment
- Java Servlets for back-end
- Google Javascript API for representing geographical point(place guides) on the map and for geolocation
- Google Places API for getting detailed information about places, enable searching for places and for geocoding
- Google Userservice API: for authenticating and identifying users, based on their Google accounts.
- Datastore API: Store all string data, including our parsed file meta data.
- Blobstore API: Blobstore does the parsing and hosting for the uploaded file instead of handing it to Datastore, and provides a key for file access.
To run the project, you need to install Maven and the Google Cloud Platform SDK.
Additionally, after cloning the project, you will need an API key for the Google Maps and Places APIs.
Include the key in a file ~/step253-2020/src/main/webapp/maps/api_key.js, with the following content:
function setApiKeyAndMapsCallback() {
document.getElementById('maps-api').src ='https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=YOUR_API_KEY&callback=initPage&libraries=places';
}
To run the project on the server, navigate to the root(step253-2020) and then
- for running a development server, execute the command
mvn package appengine:run - to deploy the project on the live server, you will need to set your own project id in pom.xml, and then execute the command
mvn package appengine:deploy
This application was developed by Dennis and Bori, as a capstone project for Google's STEP internship program, in Summer, 2020.
Our hosts and mentors throughout the development process were Christian Göllner and Hung Tran.