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Hobart
UXC Applications Development (formerly Dytech Solutions) and the RACT are teaming
up to offer an exciting project that will be both challenging technically and
provide a very useful community service.
The RACT is very keen to foster competition in petrol pricing. In Western Australia
petrol stations are required by legislation to report petrol prices to a central
web-site on a daily basis, so that motorists can easily compare prices and find
the cheapest petrol stations in their locality. In Tasmania there is no such
legislation, and the petrol stations refuse to provide up to date pricing information.
This project will involve creating a new site that allows the community to provide
the information daily to a central database that tracks petrol prices. Besides
the database itself, the central theme of the project is to enable the easiest
and broadest possible methods to get the data in and out. The site would provide
incentives for the public to provide the information.
On the input side (getting the price data into the system), possible options
are:
• AJAX based website
• Smart Phone/PDA mobile version of website
• SMS (send price data in a text message)
• IVR (key in the price data over the phone)
• One exciting possibility would be to allow people to take photos of
the price boards with their mobile phone cameras and send them to the server,
and use image recognition to recognise the price data
An AJAX based website to display the current price data would be the major output.
Other desirable features would include :
• A version of the website viewable on smart phones and PDAs
• Integration with Google Maps to show the best prices in your current
location. Ideally this would use the Geolocation/GPS features of 3G phones.
Otherwise the site would remember the user’s preferred location
• SMS of best prices on request
• Charts and other graphics showing price trends over time
A full Java Enterprise stack:
• Java
• Tomcat
• GWT (Google Web Toolkit) / AJAX
• Eclipse
• Google Maps API
• Oracle Database or SQL Server 2005 (TBD)
• Hibernate/JPA ORM
• Spring Framework
An IP agreement is required.
Client Name (person who will be student contact): Jon Nermut
Phone Number (business hours): 6235 2222
Mobile Number (if have one): 0409 129488
Email Address: jon.nermut@appsdev.uxc.com.au
Website (if have one): http://www.appsdev.uxc.com.au/
, http://www.ract.com.au
Address (where students will visit, not PO Box): Level 2, 25 Argyle St, Hobart
The estimated software difficulty rating is 4-4.5