Making deliveries easy.
The innovapost delivery challenge inspired us to create this app. We targetted our app towards small businesses competing with giants like Amazon to get same day delivery.
The concept behind the application is simple. Businesses have the opportunity to sign up and add products to their inventory list. Our server will then perform end of day route calculations for all deliveries, up to a maximum of 24 per route. Everyday, drivers will have the opportunity to log on and look at available routes. Once they find an available route, they are able to pick them up and start driving.
These routes usually include starting at the store's address and delivering packages along a short route.
- Flutter and Dart were used for the front end.
- Node.JS for a backend server implementation
- Firebase for Auth and DB
- Google Cloud Platform tools including Google Maps itself (a screen on our application) and the Google Directions API to find shortest path with multiple waypoints.
- Lots of problems implementing Firebase with Dart and Flutter. This was just a learning curve problem, and now we're able to do it easily the next time we decide to use Firebase.
- Flutter and Dart also had a learning curve we needed to get over, but that's a lot of what hackathons are for.
A huge part of building this application was also learning to use Flutter and Dart. None of our team members had any previous experience using these tools, but we came together to learn them to develop a beautiful functioning application.
- Flutter / Dart
- Node.JS (Express) backend
- How to use GCP
- Google Maps integrations
We don't know if we're going to continue working on the application, but this was a great starting point for all of us in using new tools and languages. Flutter is a great tool that is not that hard to use and implement, and Dart is an easy to read and easy to write language. The pub.dev website containing dart packages also contains a lot of resources and is a great software development starting point.
Spending a lot of time with GCP integration was also useful for our future projects. We've gained skills in using Google Maps in applications as well as integrating different Google services.