app for localize the bus of university

Hi everyone, my name is koba; and I am a student in computer science and I have been learning python / django for 2 years on my own.
and I would like to create a real time application to locate buses because we students are wasting so much time waiting for the bus; I was wondering if we could create an app to have the bus route and it will save us a lot of time.
i am learning django-channel.

And my question what are the technologies that I should use?

thank you!

Yes you can very much do this.

Most of it however is going to be JavaScript to run on the browser-side.

I’m assuming that someone, somewhere, tracks and makes available to you the current locations of the buses. You’ve got a couple different ways of handling it - and not all of it requires Django.

Depending upon the availability of the API to retrieve the current bus location, you could write your JavaScript client to retrieve the data directly from that API rather than through your server.

But realistically, for something like this, it doesn’t really demand the use of Channels or websockets. If I were designing this, I would just write my JavaScript to poll for the data once every 15 - 30 seconds. I doubt seriously that a typical bus is going to travel far enough in that period of time to make a significant difference, and unless you’re doing this for a very large municipality, that’s not going to create sufficient load to cause a problem.

Thank you KenWhitesell for answering me and you apologize for taking a long time to answer you and it won’t happen again!

So I do all the work in javascript and query the data with the APIs?

I guess the most important question is, where are you getting this data from regarding the current location of the buses?

If that information (current location) is available through a public, web-accessible API, then yes, I would do everything in JavaScript. I wouldn’t see the need to put a Django site in-between those requests.

However, my answer changes if any of the below are true:

  • The API isn’t truly public.
  • The API is rate-limited or has other restrictions
  • The API doesn’t provide the data in a convenient format

I don’t know if I should put a connect object in the bus to locate each bus like uber does