Are you interested in Mobile phones, Public transport, and Open Source? Have a look..

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UPDATE
This app is working for Belgium and netherlands

Hello all,

I just wanted to talk to you about a community project that is really growing fast and will become something huge soon! We really need the help of the xda community to make it available everywhere. So please take the time to read, forgive my english knowledge and typos and contact me to have more infos.

iRail.be is an attempt to make transportation time schedules easily available for anyone. We are doing this by creating an Application Programming Interface. This interface is implemented in PHP and can be reused by various of other projects.

Our main site consists of a very easy mobile website to look up time schedules using our own API.

I think that we all have smartphones (iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, WebOS, Bada) to get real time information.

One topic that should interest everyone is public transport, because while waiting for a train, subway, bus, you have your phone in your hand and you wonder "When will my vehicle arrive?"

Sometimes, you have some electronic panels on the station, but most of the time, these panels does not provide info you need or you are not at the station.

That's why I first began to create an application that provide Real Time information about trains in Belgium on Android:

http://www.cyrket.com/p/android/tof.cv.mpp/




Click for full size - Uploaded with Skitch


Click for full size - Uploaded with Skitch

This app was scrapping the train company information and was working quite well.

Then I met some other Belgian people that were working on an API for trains, and I just want to talk you about this project and get the help of the xda community to make something big and open source.

The project is located here: http://project.irail.be/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi

and you will have a lot informations by browsing the project page.

The main point is to make an API for public transports and folowing KISS guidelines (Keep It Short and Simple), just have a look at the description: http://project.irail.be/cgi-bin/trac...iki/APIv1Draft


So time is now on working to make it bigger and use it everywhere in the world.

Current status:
The API is working for trains in Belgium and we have already build:

* a website
* an Android app

Some projects are going worked on:

* an iPhone application
* Bada, Windows Mobile 7, QT.

What we plan to do in the future:

* Support other countries than Belgium.
* Support other transportations than trains.
* Create applications for every device and websites.

Why do we need your help?

First of all, we would like to make this app available for Europe. Because our route planner algorithm is working for every european train station.
So, we just need a list of stations of your country and the GPS location (Latitude/longitude) like this one:

http://api.irail.be/stations.php

If you want to add your country or can bring us help on an other transportation type feel free to reply to this topic.

Other help appreciated?

* You want to create something in your country (worldwide) by adding something new like subway in Mexico, Taxi in China, Airplanes in Egypt?

* You can code and improve the php code?

* You can help us to make a cool website?

* You are creative and have idea?

Just reply to this topic.

Who can help us?

* Everyone
* you have some ideas?
* you can code in PHP?
* You are a designer and you have photoshop/other skills?
* You can develop an application for mobile phones?
* ...



Conclusion


I hope that this project can get some enthousiast people and we will be able soon to provide open data to your country and on your mobile device.
Thanks for reading!

Congrats!
Thanks for sharing!
Shame I don´t live in Europe

Living in Mexico is not a problem. You can add your train data easily, but you need to rewrite some code to adapt that to your train, plane, bus, subway company...

Really interesting! I'm new too all these, but soon when i have my android and more knowledge i hope i can help out, might have some ideas!

Regards from Portugal!

Hi,

I'd definitely be interested in helping with UI design. Just a couple of questions first though:

1. Would you be making a separate app for each country, or would you want one app to cover all included countries?

2. Where's the Android app source code? I checking it out with an SVN client by typing:

svn checkout http://betrains.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ betrains-read-only

...but I just got an empty folder!

Downloaded from github, but that doesn't seem to contain any Android stuff, so I'm a bit lost!

Cheers

I'm the developer/creator of the most popular Train departure times/Planner on Android for the Netherlands. (TreinTijden Lite/Pro)

I have a file containing all the dutch train stations, including the official "shorttag" and all GPS coordinates. Ofcourse i have also worked pretty hard on the parsing stuff for from the official website.

What I am wondering though, is there gonna be a "official" train application for Android? Because I don't really agree with the way BETrains is made usability wise. Because i would love to support more countries in my own TreinTijden application using an Api or something else.

Good idea.

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Hello I'm Sven from the netherlands, 15 years old.

I build a few weeks a go this website (it works only with html 5: chrome, Safari, Android, Ios) and is have one bug.

Sorry I'm not allowed to post links look on my twitter "sven4all" (google sven4all twitter) for the web adres..

I will help you with design the website make a comment what you found about my website. I can a little bit php

list of all stations of the netherlands google wikipedia "stations nederland"

Thanks alot for this application, using it for a while now .

Just, if I can submit you an request, you can choose to not only use trains, but also metro's and buses. But, you can't select anything else than a station. It would be awesome if you could choose for example bus halts, I always use the b-rail.be site for buses because the De Lijn site sucks.

If that would be possible, your app would be perfect .

Great work my fellow friend !

project iRail

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Hi!

I'm Pieter from project iRail. I've got a link to this thread through twitter and I'll be happy to answer some of your questions

Originally Posted by xcmeathead

1. Would you be making a separate app for each country, or would you want one app to cover all included countries?

We're working on APIs for each country in Europe. Wow we only support Belgium, although Dutch, German and French APIs are coming very soon. So there will not be any limit for client developers: If you have implemented the API for one country, automatically other countries will be supported if only you change the base url. (for instance for Belgium this is api.irail.be)

I've written a blogpost on this some time ago (bonsansnom.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/transport-data-roaming/) which brings on the idea of transport data roaming: if you use your application abroad, it should automatically return you the train information of that country.

Originally Posted by xcmeathead

2. Where's the Android app source code? I checking it out with an SVN client by typing:
svn checkout betrains.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ betrains-read-only
Downloaded from github, but that doesn't seem to contain any Android stuff, so I'm a bit lost!

svn checkout betrains.googlecode.com/svn/BETrains\ 2.0 betrains

(add http yourself)
This will work better. Apparently the code is stored in another folder than trunk.

Originally Posted by Wiebbe

I'm the developer/creator of the most popular Train departure times/Planner on Android for the Netherlands. (TreinTijden Lite/Pro)

I have a file containing all the dutch train stations, including the official "shorttag" and all GPS coordinates. Ofcourse i have also worked pretty hard on the parsing stuff for from the official website.

What I am wondering though, is there gonna be a "official" train application for Android? Because I don't really agree with the way BeTrains is made usability wise. Because i would love to support more countries in my own TreinTijden application using an Api or something else.

Our point is that there should not be an "official" train application. Everyone can use the data and everyone can make their own client based on their own needs. Further more we know that our interface is not the best someone can image. You can help us create a better interface for our "supported" clients called BeTrains. We would be very pleased to work together, so feel free to contact me in any way you can find (I'm pietercolpaert on the interwebs). You can as well take a look at our development API for the Netherlands here:

dev.api.irail.nl/connections/?to=Nijmegen&from=Leiden

Pieter,

project.iRail.be