GTUG Campout and Trippy the travel assistant
I just got back from an very awesome GTUG Campout. The goal of the weekend was to code a functional Google app during the course of the weekend. On Friday, there were a couple of Wave tutorials but the balance of the weekend was all about hacking. Most of the teams chose to use Google Wave but there were a couple Android and general App Engine teams(Wave robots run in AppEngine).
My team and I created Trippy, a virtual travel assistant. We had airline and hotel information polling from Kayak and only after meticulously coding it and a handcoded XML to JSON parser (AppEngine doesn't like SAX or JDOM), we found that it horribly crashed on App Engine. Querying Yelp for points of interest in a given area was originally a wishlist feature but became the centerpiece of our demo.
How it works:
Trippy runs on the AppEngine and uses Google Wave to interact with users.
- Trippy asks you what city you are interested in.
- Trippy asks you activities you would like to do.
- Trippy queries Yelp and returns the top three results for the keywords you entered including the name of the business, the phone number, address, and links to the business's review page on Yelp and a Google Map link.
To use Trippy: Add him(trip-bot@appspot.com) to a wave and he'll start talking to you.
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We didn't win any prizes but I'm proud of what we accomplished in the weekend. Sometimes the best way to learn is to be thrown into the deep end and told to swim...thought a swimming analogy was apropos given the name of the technology.
You can wave me (wave to me, not quite sure of the proper verb yet) at j@wavesandbox.com. Yup, just j. The source code to Trippy is out there but needs to be cleaned up.
I have to thank the GTUG organizers and volunteers are awesome and organized a great event.