The backend part proved to be quite a challenge but we managed to provide a working set of services that should be consumed by the frontend part.
We decided that we should use BIG DATA technologies because the volume of data can grow dramatically over time. As a storage engine we chose HBASE (this project was born as a reaction to a white paper published by some Google engineers). It is quite an interesting piece of technology that allows us to scale very easily.
In HBASE we store all of our data: customers, packages, tracking data, reviews and so on. To make this data available to the frontend we came up with a set of rich APIs that we implemented in PHP. We decided over PHP because it enabled us to speed up the process tremendously.
First we designed the API calls and then we implemented some mock up calls so that our frontend can use them right away.
We also used some of the Google Maps APIs in order to calculate the distance that a person should travel to deliver a package.
Our HBASE data modeling skills have improved during this hackaton partly due to the brainstorming sessions.
We are proud that we can deliver such a complex solution to an issue that is still to be addressed by the developer community world-wide.
Our tool is a crowd-sourcing approach to the package delivery that nowadays is growing exponentially.
We have to mention that we had quite often internet problems but that didn't affect us, it actually helped us to reconsider our solution from an infrastructure point of view.
Our backend infrastructure is using a Linux environment.
https://github.com/netex-skunkworks/UPackBack
category: smart city table: 8
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