Android Applications

Greece Train Schedules

I take the trains a lot in Greece, but don't have a data plan so I usually can't check OSE's schedules online. So, I created this simple (at least for now) Android application that will download select routes to your phone so you can access them offline later. I'm hoping that it will prove as useful for others as it does for me.

The native Android layer is built like a normal Android application. Routes from specific cities can be downloaded (and synchronized, in case of changes) as often as you like. When downloading a route, the native layer makes a call to some PHP web services I wrote, which serve as the backend. These "services" make use of OSE's site in order to retrieve the schedules, returning them in XML format to the android app. The services also feature caching, so that if more than one request is made for the same route within the same day, the previous XML will be returned.

I'm actively developing this project, and always looking for input as to what others would find useful, so if you have any comments or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me or raise an issue on the project's bugtracker on github. It's an open source project so you can even contribute your own code if you like :)

Links:

• Greece Train Routes in the Android Market (go here to download)
• Android source code on github (go here to play :)
• PHP Backend source on github

Related posts while making this app:

• Android emulator window too large to resize in Mac OS X
• Android emulator mysteriously crashing on Mac OS X
• Retrieving via POST and parsing webpage contents in PHP
• Managing multiple tables in the Android SDK
• Hello Android "No such file or directory"