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User can look for ports & ship in a particular location
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Shows Live Location of Ports and Ships
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Home Page
Inspiration
Our daily life depends greatly on mapping. We use Google maps to commute get information about traffic, explore new landscapes, estimating arrival time and much more. However, what about the ocean enthusiast and ship captains? Most of us have never seen a software which helps navigate the oceans! and this is our project's goal, to explore the ocean track ships find ports and docks. Overall, the lack of technology involving marine transport and tracking is what inspired us to make out project TripSync.
What it does
Our project TripSync uses Microsoft Bing Maps API along with MarineTraffic API and AIS Hub We are requesting port location, live ship location from these API's and creating a SQL database which stores all this coordinate data obtained through API's. We then utilize the Bing Maps API and its GetMap/PushPin methods to show the map to the user and dynamically show live locations of exactly where a particular ship is located.
How we built it
This Web Application is build using API's, Web Development technologies like PHP, JavaScript, SQL, MyPHPAdmin, HTML5, XAMPP, & CSS. We have also utilised Bootstrap to enhance the User Interface our webpage.
Challenges we ran into
Building any project that integrates API's is quite challenging. The most difficult part of our development process was getting the data!. There is very less information about our oceans in fact only 5% of all the ocean is explored. As a result We found it extremely difficult to get data about ports , and especially live ship locations. We were using MarineTraffic API, However, the free version of it only allows the user to send 1 request per minute and that's nothing!. We need thousands of rows in our database to make out project useful to our users and I did by running a script 5 hours a day for last 3 days. After this I was able to get almost 2000 live locations and ports from all round the world and that's how we build our project. We also ran into issues like showing a drop pin onto the ship location but we solved the issue by spending almost one and half hour reading microsoft Maps API documentation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I am proud of completing the project in such a short time and working with new technologies like Bootstrap, Maps API, and AIS hub. I am grateful that I am able to build project that has the power to bring changes to a user's life and explore the most unexplored landscape of our planet.
What we learned
We learned essential skills like integrating API's working with databases, integrating PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into one PHP file which was necessary for the functioning of our project and the most important debugging skills.
What's next for TripSync
We AIM to make out website more optimised and user friendly. We also aim to add location services and build routes in oceans that can used by ship captains to navigate the oceans.
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