Project - Mobile Interface

Purpose

This page is a project description for a Final Year Software Engineering Project. It will be completed by two students working part-time (10 hr/week) from March - Sept 2011.

Overview

Sahana Eden is an Open Source Humanitarian Platform which can be used to provide applications for Disaster Management, Development, and Environmental Management sectors. These solutions are often more practical if they can be accessed on mobile devices. Sahana Eden is written in Python and uses ​Web2Py which is extended by S3XRC to make it a Rapid Application Development (RAD) platform from which custom solutions can easily be created. Using the RESTful API Sahana Eden can automatically create CRUD(create, read, update, delete and list) User Interfaces for data resources and also represent them in different data formats (XML, RSS, JSON, etc).

This project would extend S3XRC to automatically produce user interfaces for mobile devices. This will include a number of new challenges:

• Designing an interface for a smaller screen.
• Offline Storage which can be synced later via mobile data networks, wifi or possibly SMS.
• Touch Screen Support (especially for mapping)
• Integration with Phone Camera
• Integration with Geolocation

Although previous solutions have focused on single platforms (specifically Android), it would be more ideal if the solution was cross-platform. HTML5 has been proposed as one method of achieving this.

For this project it is more important to deliver minimal functionality which is robust, well tested and documented, rather than "all the bells and whistles". To these ends, this project would ideally include:

• Demonstration
• Developers Guidelines
• User Guidelines

Current Progress

There has been previous work done on mobile clients, but we don't yet have a full solution:

• BluePrintMobileClient
• BluePrintMobilePortal

This can be reviewed and possibly built upon.

Working with Sahana Eden

The students working on this projects will be expected to work in collaboration with the Sahana Eden community, to ensure that the solution is integrated with the Sahana Eden trunk code. This will hopefully include:

• Regular* updates to the MailingList
• Regular* merges with Sahana code base

*weekly-monthly depending on other workload

The Sahana Eden Community will help the students to get set up as Sahana contributors, provide additional guidance on the functionality and the University Supervisor will provide more of the day to day support.

If it is possible, parts of this project could incorporated into Google Summer of Code projects, to allow the students to participate in this project. This will need to be approved with both the Sahana Software Foundation and Google first however.