CSP301: Project 2 on Developing a Web-based Mobile Application

Background reading

HTML, PHP, Perl, AJAX

The App

Your goal is to develop a Map-based social/traffic application with web and mobile interfaces. Develop your application on the Android platform using the Android emulator. The application should use your current location coordinates (assume they can be obtained through GPS hardware) and show your location on the map along with the location of all your friends. Furthermore, you should be able to select a destination point on the map, and the application should give you the shortest path to that destination considering the current traffic situation. Develop your prototype for the IIT Delhi campus map.
Here are some steps you need to follow:

Download IIT Delhi campus map.
Mark the roads on the map. Assume that all routes have to be through the roads.
Develop an interactive (preferably AJAX-based) web interface to the map application. The users need to login to identify themselves to the map application. The inputs to the application are the current locations of all the users, and users can use the application to find the shortest path considering the current traffic situation. The application should also allow a user to add friends and then show her the current position of all her friends on the map as she browses it. For shortest-path computation, estimate the time of travelling a road using a weighted function: T(road) = Length(road)*W_length + Traffic(road)*W_traffic W_length and W_traffic are tunable parameters that the user can decide at runtime. The traffic depends on the number of users currently logged in and their current location.
Download the Android emulator and understand how it works.
Implement a mobile-based interface for the application. The mobile interface can be either a custom-app for Android or a web-based interface. If you decide to use a web-based interface, you should have a different (more user-friendly for small-screen) interface when using a mobile phone than when using a laptop/desktop computer (e.g., www.gmail.com appears different on mobile browsers than desktop browsers). The mobile interface should communicate with the web server and render the results. It should also report the user's current location to the web server using it's GPS hardware.
Better user-interfaces (in design and implementation) will be rewarded more
You will need to run a webserver with which your user's laptops/phones will communicate. You can run the Apache webserver on an unprivileged port (say 8080) on one of the GCL lab machines
Once you have tested your mobile interface on the emulator, we can arrange for you to test it on a real Android device.

Note:

To be done in groups of four.
Credit will be awarded to easier-to-use user interfaces
The last date of submission of the assignment is Nov 26. The demos will be held on Nov 27 and 28 (Saturday/Sunday).