Goal

A convenient web interface to the GPS track data gathered by the My Tracks application on the Android phone.

Features

1. Easily load ride data from Google Fusion Tables into a user’s account
2. Display maps of all the user’s rides like this that can be easily browsed and searched
3. Allow user to attach public/private notes to each ride
4. Support for Metric and English units

The TODO list

0. User feedback during ride import process
1. Robust search/filtering capability (currently can only search by user ID)
2. Show multiple routes on a single map
3. More interesting and customizable aggregate statistics on rides
4. Long term: provide a distribution of the elapsed time between two user-selected waypoints (across all the rides that went through those waypoints).

AJAX for ride import

• Click 'Import Rides'
• Request for list of ride ids that aren't in DB
• "Status: getting new rides"
• Spawn series of requests (batches of 5?) to import rides
• "Status: importing rides"
• Append new ride descriptions to page

Data Sources:

• My ride spreadsheet
• My fusion tables as well their Google Docs counterparts
• The application’s database

Models:

• User - has many Rides
• Ride - belongs to a User

Implementation notes

Displaying the maps

• Use the Google Maps Javascript API to create a Fusion Table layer (using the Fusion Table IDs from the user)
• Find centerpoint and bounding boxes for map by parsing the ride data and using the geo_data gem.
• Pass the necessary inputs to the javascript code by setting HTML attributes in the <div> element where the map will be inserted.

Getting up and running

• bundle install
• bundle exec rake db:migrate
• bundle exec rake db:test:prepare
• bundle exec thin start (for development use thin instead of webrick, works with the google auth)
• edit /etc/hosts file
• Postgresql is the DB, some helpful commands:
• to install (on OS X): brew install postgresql
• on Ubuntu, to create the databases: sudo -u postgres createdb db/test sudo -u postgres createdb db/development
• to get status of server: pg_ctl status -D /usr/local/var/postgres/
• to list available databases: psql -l
• to process the background jobs that fetch Temperature data from Weather Underground: heroku run rake jobs:work Click on "Update Rides" in app (this puts rides without Temperature data on the queue)
• Check out the startft.rb script for using GData::FusionTables interface
• set client secret in config/initializers from https://code.google.com/apis/console/

General Resources

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
http://bostonrb.org/presentations/write-code-faster-expert-level-vim Good talk on using VI for Rails
http://railscasts.com/episodes/37-simple-search-form?autoplay=true
http://railscasts.com/episodes/213-calendars?autoplay=true
http://railscasts.com/episodes/174-pagination-with-ajax
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L_dEOjhADQ
http://rubular.com/ The nifty reg exp playground
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html
http://railscasts.com/episodes/51-will-paginate
http://railscasts.com/episodes/132-helpers-outside-views
http://railscasts.com/episodes/271-resque

Authentication

http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OpenID.html Uses the Hybrid strategy (OpenID authentication of user + OAuth authorization for access to Fusion Tables)
http://railscasts.com/episodes/235-omniauth-part-1?autoplay=true
http://railscasts.com/episodes/236-omniauth-part-2 At 11:30 see how to override devise password required.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/241-simple-omniauth <http://railscasts.com/episodes/151-rack-middleware?view=similar (background for omniauth)>
http://railscasts.com/episodes/210-customizing-devise?autoplay=true
https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageDomains
####A working example of using omniauth with Google as a provider.

1. First, I Googled ‘providers in omniauth’
2. using pry (cd OmniAuth::Strategies::Goo > tab complete to see all Google strategies)
3. bundle open omniauth to look at the source code
4. from a comment in the gems-open-id*google_hybrid file found this example, made by the person who wrote the provider

Google APIs

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/gdata_on_rails.html
http://code.google.com/apis/fusiontables/docs/sample_code.html

Ruby wrappers for APIs

https://github.com/tokumine/fusion_tables
https://github.com/balexand/gdata_plus

Other

https://github.com/rstacruz/nakedpaper/tree/ How to set environment variables on Heroku.
https://github.com/jchunky/table_builder An updated version of table_builder that works on 3.1