Traveler’s Almanac
Nov 2015 - Dec 2015
Traveler's Almanac's intends to solve the problem of the lack of information when looking for a hotel, especially about the environment around the hotel. When making travel plans in advance, most of the time, the individual would likely not be aware of the weather conditions, or what the area is like without having done some research beforehand.
Traveler's Almanac is a web application hosted by Google App Engine and uses API's from rome2rio, wunderground and flickr.
Team
Khalil Somani
Role
Design & Development
Process
Considering the problem we wanted to solve, we identified the value of the system. This system would enable people interested in traveling to see important information such as hotel information and forecasting all in one place. There is also the potential to include images of the location site, making it a quick and easy way for travelers so see where they are going and how they should pack/plan for the trip based on weather conditions. This would be an alternative to finding the information across a variety of different websites by consolidating it all into one place.
Initially, we planned on using TripAdvisor and Google Maps, but obtaining the TripAdvisor key was not easily accessible and found Google Maps unnecessary during the coding process. Ultimately, the API's we chose to use were:
rome3rio: to present flight itineraries based on user input
flickr: to provide images based on tag search results
wunderground: to present a 10-day forecast based on location
We extracted necessary information from the API's using the JSON format and sorting through a number of nested dictionaries. After the program was returning the correct information, the web application was formatted using HTML and CSS and hosted it up on Google App Engine.