Check us out

Although Google Maps API has proven to be a cool and powerful tool to provide the user with information we had a major issue with it. Most developers use the API to display on the map a local business. Due to only having one location to point out, Google only gave examples for hardcoding your latitude and longitude directly into the function. When we attempted to pass in our coordinates based on the city button click it wouldn't work. The questions on how to solve this problem is all over the web, however we could not find a single working solution. Actually, many of the forum post are never even answered. With the use of FireFox's debugger, we eventually discovered what was going wrong. The parameters were being passed in just fine. But the Google API worked by opening the page the map will be displayed on (leaving the JavaScript) then getting the data to show the map in regards to (returning to the JavaScript). We then realized once this focus shift would occur, our variables created for capturing our passed in values would clear out back to undefined. We finally found a solution to handle this problem (which we consider to be a valuable lesson) and it was to make the variable passed in persistent. We used

Okay, so the flight API thing was an epic failure. Are we going to turn back now? No way!! We set out with a vision, and we are going to follow through. So, here is another way we discovered that allows a developer to pull data from an existing website. 

Option 1: Scraping

What is scraping? It’s basically a way to pull information from other web sites. It sounds simple enough, but in reality it’s not so easy. Google flights along with other sites run there viewable source code through a scrambler. This makes the code unreadable to humans and next impossible to work with for data scraping. We suppose there exist a way to still accomplish this but we didn't have the time to waste on figuring it out. 

The only alternative we could come up with now in order to proceed with the project is to fake the returned flight information. We had 2 options here.

Option 2: Database of flights

This is a good alternative, but in the end we passed on this option also. The focus of this project is on web services, not SQL queries. 

Option 3: Hard coded flights details/images

It started out promising

We registered for the Rome2Rio API and received a unique key to attach with our GET request. The documentation that explained how to make request also seemed helpful. They also provided a auto-fill text box that would populate with any airport in the world.    

The letdown 

We discovered that Rome2Rio wasn't for just flights but for travel from any location to any location. So, the auto-fill text box would fill not only with any airport but also any city in the world. We did not want this because it could give misleading information. After searching the web for some time and coming up empty handed, we decided to build our own. This was a grueling process and took hours of copy and pasting (not fun). The code is available in case anyone should need it. Here is the link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1JQvIdwmhX2SFNSZ0d4anRaZ00/edit?usp=sharing

The search for a flight API has begun! After many Google searches and many hours of sifting through API’s on programmable web (a great resource for API’s), we are left with a remarkably small number of options. If you’re not a multi-national company with serious web traffic and extra cash, it turns out it’s pretty difficult to get your hands on flight information.

This is the list of API’s that made it to our final run through:

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/rome2rio

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/travelocity

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/expedia

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/skyscanner

http://www.programmableweb.com/api/cleartrip

After spending some time sifting through these options, we thought we found a winner—Skyscanner. However, we were disappointed once again. After digging further into the API documentation, we found that the API service is not free. Skyscanner does offer a free widget called “Skytools,” but that was not what we were looking for.

Exterior:

On the front end, we are aiming for a minimalist design. We are keeping our application user-friendly by using a simplistic layout that is easy for all users to understand and navigate.

Inner-workings:

Have you ever found yourself looking at a map and realizing how many places you’ve never been? Or maybe you are overdue for a vacation but just can’t afford those hefty flight cost? If you said yes to either of these, Trinity Travel is here to help.

When coming up with names for our company and website we starting compiling a list. Many seemed catchy however, after some word play, we came up with Tech Trinity (company) and Trinity Travel (website) and knew we had a winner. So, onto the branding. We tinkered with some online logo makers but many ended up unattractive. We eventually came across "The Logo Creator". It isn't as powerful as "Adobe Photoshop", although, its learning curve was not bad at all. And here is what we came up with.