How would I go about doing this?

[Guest]

So I want to make an app for my school. I attend a boarding school (although I don't board) but in order to go to Dunkin Donuts or 7 Eleven or anything thats close by you have to either go see one of the faculty in person or text them. I wanted to develop an app where everyone has it and they can check out with a button and the faculty gets a notification, and if they dont sign back into the app by a certain point the faculty gets another notificastion saying so. I'd assume I would have to set up a computer running 24/7 to handle this but how would I make this work? And could a Raspberry Pi handle it? (low power and small)

[Himommies]

Just hire a professional.You woudn't be done by the time you graduated 

[Eric++]

5 minutes ago, Abyss Gaming said:

So I want to make an app for my school. I attend a boarding school (although I don't board) but in order to go to Dunkin Donuts or 7 Eleven or anything thats close by you have to either go see one of the faculty in person or text them. I wanted to develop an app where everyone has it and they can check out with a button and the faculty gets a notification, and if they dont sign back into the app by a certain point the faculty gets another notificastion saying so. I'd assume I would have to set up a computer running 24/7 to handle this but how would I make this work? And could a Raspberry Pi handle it? (low power and small)

A raspberry pi should be able to handle this. The hard part is going to be networking unless your school's IT department is willing to help out. The server (the raspberry pi in this case) will need to be visible to every app client. I can give you more advice with programming if you'd like as well!

[Guest]

Just now, Eric++ said:

A raspberry pi should be able to handle this. The hard part is going to be networking unless your school's IT department is willing to help out. The server (the raspberry pi in this case) will need to be visible to every app client. I can give you more advice with programming if you'd like as well!

I just need a start point really. I'm fine with researching the rest. And would it be easier to keep the Pi at the school? Or at my house?

[Himommies]

2 minutes ago, Abyss Gaming said:

I just need a start point really. I'm fine with researching the rest. And would it be easier to keep the Pi at the school? Or at my house?

At the school I imagine.

But actullay don't attempt it 

[Eric++]

Just now, Abyss Gaming said:

I just need a start point really. I'm fine with researching the rest. And would it be easier to keep the Pi at the school? Or at my house?

At your school would probably be ideal since you could just use your schools LAN for everything. Although you should get a demo working before you make it too far. I would suggest making a webapp for all of this. I like groovy/grails although I'm not sure how well it would run on a Pi.

[Guest]

Just now, Eric++ said:

 schools LAN for everything.

True, much easier to do I'd imagine. Guess the only thing is someone could easily hack into it Dont think anyone would tho...

[Eric++]

1 minute ago, Himommies said:

But actullay don't attempt it 

Why shouldn't he attempt this? The app seems simple enough.

[Guest]

Just now, Eric++ said:

Why shouldn't he attempt this? The app seems simple enough.

Yea I dont really know much but it doesnt seem like itd be complex tbh

[Eric++]

1 minute ago, Abyss Gaming said:

True, much easier to do I'd imagine. Guess the only thing is someone could easily hack into it Dont think anyone would tho...

Hacking shouldn't be too much of a problem. The only issue would be some students trying to annoy faculty members but what else is new. There shouldn't be any kind of security problems to worry about.

[Guest]

Just now, Eric++ said:

Hacking shouldn't be too much of a problem. The only issue would be some students trying to annoy faculty members but what else is new. There shouldn't be any kind of security problems to worry about.

Yea thats what I mean it wouldnt be an issue with security, just annoying

[Eric++]

Just now, Abyss Gaming said:

Yea thats what I mean it wouldnt be an issue with security, just annoying

Just talk to your school's faculty about it. They can discipline the students who misuse it how they wish. Maybe they'll want you to add a block feature for specific users to solve that.

[Guest]

Just now, Eric++ said:

Just talk to your school's faculty about it. They can discipline the students who misuse it how they wish. Maybe they'll want you to add a block feature for specific users to solve that.

Alright so I dont wanna bother you but where do you think I should start for this?

[Eric++]

Just now, Abyss Gaming said:

Alright so I dont wanna bother you but where do you think I should start for this?

Do you want to make a smartphone app or a webapp?

 

If you're going to make an android app then I would suggest android studio for the client side. You can really use whatever language you want for the server side. I've used python for some projects and it's gone well.

 

If you're going to make a webapp I would suggest something like grails. It takes a bit of learning but it's fairly simple to use.

 

Either route you wish to take, just start by figuring out how to make everything talk to eachother. It's pretty simple with grails since it's just web development. For the app, you'll have to learn about sockets.

 

If you're an apple user and wanted to make an app on the app store then I'm not sure what to tell you. I hear it's pretty easy but I've never tried myself.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Eric++ said:

If you're an apple user and wanted to make an app on the app store then I'm not sure what to tell you. I hear it's pretty easy but I've never tried myself.

The complex thing is it'd have to be both since 80+ percent of my school have iPhones, thanks so much for your help tho.

[Eric++]

Just now, Abyss Gaming said:

The complex thing is it'd have to be both since 80+ percent of my school have iPhones, thanks so much for your help tho.

Go the webapp route then. That way everyone just needs to go to a website. The hardest part is going to be managing users. You have to figure out how to identify students from faculty and remember if they're checked in or out. Your first priority should just be familiarizing yourself with the platform. 

 

http://guides.grails.org/creating-your-first-grails-app/guide/index.html

 

This tutorial should help you figure out how to get started. I use intellij as my IDE for grails but you can use whatever you like really.

[vorticalbox]

11 hours ago, Abyss Gaming said:

the faculty gets a notification,

what sort of notification? If it's email a website would be simple get up and running and would run on a pi. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, vorticalbox said:

what sort of notification? If it's email a website would be simple get up and running and would run on a pi. 

Maybe just an email if they don't check back in within a certain time

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Abyss Gaming said:

Maybe just an email if they don't check back in within a certain time

This can be troublesome because trying to connect to an email server like Gmail these days requires some hoops due to security. You can do it, but they annoy you with "THIS CAN BE DANGEROUS, ARE YOU SURE?"

 

Used to have all sorts of fun when I figured out how to do it via my AOL email.

[LUUD18]

I would suggest make a PHP page. It is a quite easy to learn language. Then on this PHP page add some authentication so not everyone can use it and so the faculty knows who used it. Then you should read on the google Chrome Notification API so the faculty get's an notification on his phone/desktop.

 

You could use this library for the notifications:

https://github.com/web-push-libs/web-push-php

[Beesman]

On 6/2/2017 at 11:16 AM, LUUD18 said:

I would suggest make a PHP page. It is a quite easy to learn language. Then on this PHP page add some authentication so not everyone can use it and so the faculty knows who used it. Then you should read on the google Chrome Notification API so the faculty get's an notification on his phone/desktop.

 

You could use this library for the notifications:

https://github.com/web-push-libs/web-push-php

I agree with the online/cloud approach. When handling the "server" part (even if you went with a Pi) is avoidable.

You can make this with free hosting if you want to avoid any cost other than your dev time.

 

To the notification part - there are free hosting sites with SMTP servers as well.

 

To the app part - you could look into progressive web apps rather then creating apps (probably for iOS and Android) from scratch.

The google intro to this is pretty nice: https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/your-first-pwapp/#0

It also handles mentioned push notifications if the faculty is willing to use it for this side as well..

 

The annoying part will be authentication - if your school would support you in this project, try to ask if they use AD or other LDAP authentication for their systems (if students log into anything they probably do) you could manage it via that to not hassle with registrations etc. - in that case your app could run itself basically without any regular maintenance but unexpected events.