FlyNexus

Find the equidistant and cheapest airport to travel from multiple locations, using the SkyScanner API.

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Inspiration

We participated in HackUPC Fall 2016 but we didn't submit a project, because we had this idea but we spent time trying different ways of implementing the frontend and backend and didn't know how to put it together. We are inspired to make a web app, while using tools and languages we never use. Finally, we released a working version, all made in these last 36 crazy hours

What does SkyNexus do?!

Given multiple locations in the world (using the Google Maps API to find any city you type), it will find an equidistant spot (based also, on how many people are on each location). From this spot it will find the nearest airport, and then give you the cheapest flights for each person, using the SkyScanner API. It lets people from all over the world reunite in a single spot, finding the cheapest flights and same distance for all.

How we built it

It is a classic frontend and backend; because we never developed a web app, we want to use stable stuff. For example, I, Samuel Muñoz, have experience with Python, C++, and C#, and I haven't used any of these languages in this project. Instead I made the whole fronted, while learning about HTTP requests. I met people who also helped me with jQuery and the Google Maps API.

Frontend: HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, JSON, AJAX. Classic and basic. Only GET requests Backend: PHP, JSON, and more PHP. A bit of python to process the file with airport data. The server has no database, it only works with simple GET requests.

Challenges we ran into

At HackUPC Fall 2016 we didn't know how to put together a backend and frontend, because we didn't know about jQuery and AJAX, or HTTP requests. So we worked hard and learned stuff, but didn't present anything. This year we decided what technologies to use, classic and stable ones, yet we have zero experience on them. Every aspect was a challenge, but we are proud of how much we learned.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We wrote every single line of code here at HackUPC, we used stable and good old tech for the frontend and backend, so finding documentation was easy. It works! At least for a demo, since the project is not 100% finished, and It's experimental. We are proud of how much we learned, skill we gained, people we met, and fun we had at HackUPC. It is our second time.

Who and what?

Frontend (Samuel Muñoz) Backend (Guillem Ramírez)

What's next for FlyNexus

We wanted to try out a different algorithm; instead of finding the equidistant airport for all the people, we could find the prices of flights of all permutations of all places we want to reunite, and then pick the cheapest combination. Since that would require n*(n-1) calls to the API, where n is number of locations, we did not implement it.

Concurrency on the backend would make the API calls faster, but even then, the SkyScanner API is not very fast (if you want the cheapest prices it takes a bit of polling).The PHP backend is not concurrent but in the future this could be a cool idea to learn more! Also, we don't have time to add to the frontend the patata.php file, which gives the exact coordinate of the exact equidistant point and would look cooler directly on the map. But it's okay, because this demo works. Behold, It's experimental! But the idea is here.

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