UG Courses Appfor Android

Presented By:Ayelet Birnbaum

Yael Kazaz

Supervisor:Viktor Kulikov

07/05/12

Motivation

• Ever since Smart-phones entered our lives, relying solely on computers for information has become growingly difficult

• When a certain service is provided via website, it becomes much more accessible and easy to use when it is offered also as an App

• Today, most of the students at the Technion own a Smartphone

Why UG Courses App?

• The course information engine at the Technion undergraduate studies website, is a very informative tool that is highly used by undergraduate students that represent more than 70% of the entire student population at the Technion

• In this project we will create an App for Android OS that will offer most of the services that can be found in the website today

App Features

CourseSearch

My Cart ScheduleRegistratio

n InfoRegistratio

n Date

Course NameCourse Number

SemesterFaculty

Advanced Options

Presents courses in the cart

Presents the time and date that the

registration begins

1. Exam schedule

2. Total credits

3. Course list

Presents the weekly schedule

synchronized with Google

Calendar

Tools for Creating an App

Creating an App on Android

• An Android App is written in Java• Various tools are required in order for

the App to work properly in terms of communication and decoding between server and Smartphone

• In the following section of the presentation we will introduce these tools that are needed for our project

Web Services (1)

• A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web

• In our project, Web services are needed in order to enable communication between the Smartphone on which the App is installed on and the server on which the App is developed on

Web Services (2)

• When a request for a certain operation on the App is received on the server (via Tomcat) then creating a web service for the operation is required

• Creating a web service for an operation results in the creation of a cluster of files including an XML file that holds the required information and support files that instruct how to read the XML file

• Other systems interact with the Web service by using SOAP messages

SOAP

• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services

• In our project, we will use the SOAP protocol in order to communicate between the server and the Smartphone

• SOAP relies on Extensible Markup Language (XML) for its message format

• In Android there is a KSOAP2 library that works with SOAP, and it can read the web services files

Tomcat

• Apache Tomcat is an open source web server that serves a client request and receives a response from the server (two way – requests and responses)

• In our project, Tomcat is used to constantly listen for requests from the App on the Smartphone, and run the operations requested on the server

• Tomcat enables the operation with web services and is in charge of the code translation from Java to HTML

System Layout

App

Tomcat

PCWebServic

esIntern

et

SOAP

UG - FTP

Web services

SOAP

App

KSOAP2

Implementation

Class Diagram

Road Map (1): What we have done so far

• Deciding what options will be included in the App and what options will no be left out

• Defining project specifications and structure• Learning study material relevant to creating an

Android App:– Web Services– Tomcat– SOAP

• Designing App implementation and building the Class Diagram

• Creating the Mid-Term presentation

Road Map (2): Still to Come

• Gaining hands-on knowledge of how to create an Android App by creating a simple App and loading it on to the Android Smartphone

• Writing the App itself in Java on Eclipse environment, thus implementing the Class Diagram created before

• Testing the implementation• Writing the relevant code for the data transformation

between the computer and the Smartphone and the UG server

• Designing the graphical interface of the App• Creating the Final presentation• Creating the project book• Creating the project poster

Questions?

Thank You!