Google Maps

Google Maps

Utilities / Application Utilities / Mapping APIs
Needs advice
on
DjangoDjangoGolangGolang
and
ReactReact

I am a project manager, and we are looking to develop a food tracking delivery service for both mobile and web app.

Which stack do you recommend for food delivery service using Google Maps for tracking the orders and drivers.

Thank you.

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3 upvotes·15.6K views
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Technical Lead at HubSpot·

This is a pretty loaded question that can really depend on a number of other various factors. Before jumping into what stack to use, you need to determine and figure out a few more things.

  • What is your timeline?
  • How many people are on you're team and what's their current knowledge on certain languages/frameworks you're investigating (need to account for a potential ramp up period)
  • On the mobile side, do you want to maintain one codebase for ios/android? Or do you want to write separate implementations for both OS'?
  • What's the architecture look like? Are you shooting for an all-in-one monolith or separating out the business logic into smaller services?
  • Are you taking orders? If you are, are you planning on taking them and processing them on-demand? As in if you have 1-n number of orders coming in, are you going do all the business logic that sends that order to a restaurant, store, etc on one request? Or do you plan on queuing them async?
  • Do you plan on sending SMS, Email, Push notifications, etc? How are you planning on sending one or more of them for a single order, while maintaining an acceptable latency per request?
  • How to do you plan on processing events? As in: Order is place, order is ready, order is picked up, order is in route, order is delivered.

I could go over many other what-ifs here. Without much more detail here. I would say some of your first steps are in the realm of determining:

  • What does success look like with this app? As in, what features need to made, what are nice-to-haves, etc. (this will help guide you in the next part)

  • What does the architecture look like here? How is data going flow, does a monolith or service-oriented design make sense?

  • The previous point will lead you down the road of determining what other supporting software you will need such as: A queuing service (SQS, Redis, etc.), async messaging (Kafka, Kinesis, etc.).

  • Does this app require heavier computations that will require threading, etc.

  • What's the delivery time on this? Do you need a higher level language that provides a lot of abstractions or a framework that doesn't require you to write a lot of things from scratch (this comes with tradeoffs though)?

  • On the mobile/ web app side, do you need need the mobile app to do interact with the hardware a lot? Or can you get away with react native and write kotlin/java or switch where/if needed? Do you want to write completely separate business logic for both mobile and web, or would using React Web/Native make sense where you can reuse a lot of the business logic.

I know I didn't directly answer your question, but there are many things to consider here. Try answering the above questions, make a plan, determine trade-offs, and evaluate your team's knowledge. This will enable you to start breaking down your questions into more digestible parts.

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2 upvotes·185 views
CPO at Split Mobile Software·

We need some advice about the map services provider. We are a mobility app that just launched 5 months ago in Tunisia offering P2P carpooling. We are currently using Google Maps API for maps (Places API, Geocoding API, Directions API & Distance Matrix API). Thus, we received expensive bills from Google Cloud following the number of requests we are using. We are looking forward to reduce the number of requests in general because we can't afford these large bills at this stage, knowing that they are going to increase proportionally to the active users of the app. We tried to optimize multiple times but it isn't enough. We are searching for optimization advice or ideas on how we use the APIs, or other map providers (like OpenStreetMap or similar) that offers free or cheaper options than Google Maps, without lacking quality of information (we are in Tunisia and we have to choose options that have enough data about Tunisia). Thanks!

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6 upvotes·482.7K views
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Engineering Manager at BigBasket·

Besides OSM and Valhalla, you can also look into a combination of Google ORTools and OSRM. I personally haven't used Valhalla but OSM and ORTools is a powerful combination that can solve for use cases beyond routing, distance, and duration.

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2 upvotes·1 comment·3.5K views
Delhi Packers and Movers
Delhi Packers and Movers
·
July 1st 2024 at 4:25PM

https://delhipackersandmovers.co.in/

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Needs advice
on
JavaScriptJavaScriptNode.jsNode.js
and
PHPPHP

I want to make a delivery logistics web app for a small business that will run on our local server that uses Google Maps API and I’m wondering what would be the best language for that.

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2 upvotes·18.7K views
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CTO at Cloudonix LTD.·
Recommends
on
PHP

It is mostly dependent on what you feel comfortable working with (or, if you are unfamiliar with either - whether you will better connect with either one, which is not easy to predict).

I personally prefer PHP as the language is more complete and has more robust runtimes platforms. Node.js can be problematic and the NPM.js ecosystem is much more problematic than even PHP's. That being said, each have their strengths and weaknesses and one of Node.js strongest appeal is that you can use more modern languages that build on top of Javascript - such as TypeScript and still use all the existing Javascript APIs.

Now regarding the Google Maps API - Google offers a Javascript API but not a PHP API, so please note that. Its important to understand what you are getting here - the Google Maps Javascript library is meant for frontend development - i.e. to run in the browser. You didn't explain what you expect to use the Google Maps API for, but if its for displaying a map on the website and letting users click that and interact with the map, then you'd need to use the Google Maps Javascript API, but it doesn't require any specific server implementation - even if you use the server Google API SDK with Node.js, it will still look and behave differently than the frontend API, because they are meant to do different things.

If you want to use the Google Maps API on the server - for example to updates places or get routing directions, you'd need to look at the Google API HTTP examples (here's the one for routing: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/directions/get-directions#maps_http_directions_toronto_montreal-txt ) and figure out how to use these in your server. The Google documentation has samples for Javascript but not for PHP, but the official Google PHP client library has documentation that explains how to use these examples with the PHP library: https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-php-client#making-http-requests-directly .

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6 upvotes·2 comments·677 views
pharangerr
pharangerr
·
February 7th 2022 at 7:00PM

Thanks for the in depth answer. I plan on using the Google Maps API for estimating delivery times for scheduling in the system. I’m assuming that since this is my plan, Node.js is probably the way to go.

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Oded Arbel
Oded Arbel
·
February 8th 2022 at 4:43PM

So that sounds like a backend API access, where you'd probably want the Directions and possibly Distance Matrix APIs. Note that for that you don't need to use an SDK and Google docs does not show how to use one - instead you are expected to use the HTTP client for your framework (the Google docs, such as that I linked in my recommendation, show how to use Axios for Javascript, instead of the Node.JS built-in one - for good reasons). If you aren't tied down to Node.js (for example, by overwhelming amount of experience with the platform) then I do recommend looking at other options (not just PHP) as there are many good frameworks available for other languages - for example, I use Eclipse Vert.x (https://vertx.io/) and I find it very easy to work with and very performant.

That being said, similar to the official Google PHP API library I linked, the official Google Github account at https://github.com/googleapis offers libraries for most popular languages so its probably worth taking a look, regardless of which server framework you decide to use.

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Needs advice
on
IonicIonic
and
NativeScriptNativeScript

For a small mobile app that uses mostly localization, to display Google Maps with hotspots nearby, which Cross-Platform would you prefer and why? It will make requests to a Sails.js app.

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2 upvotes·32.1K views
Needs advice
on
AngularAngular
and
Angular Material Angular Material

I need to implement a web application with a sidenav "drawer".

It's a very common UI nowadays. For example, Google Maps has a collapsable sidenav on the left that shows a "drawer": inside the drawer, things can be pretty complex and interact with the main screen. Also, Google Slide has one if you choose format options.

I'm not sure which frontend framework to use. AngularJS alone will be enough? Or is there something else on top? Any useful boilerplate? I need to concentrate on the features, not much on technical details.

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5 upvotes·34.3K views
Replies (5)

Hello Glasn,

If you have been working in Angular Material for your project then you might want to do this using the Angular Material's Sidenav component. Here's the reference doc- https://material.angular.io/components/sidenav/overview

If you are not already using Angular Material, I would strongly recommend considering Bootstrap to achieve your requirements. I find Bootstrap to be more intuitive having less dependencies and shorter learning curve. Here the reference document for Bootstrap- https://mdbootstrap.github.io/bootstrap-material-design/docs/4.0/material-design/drawers/

Regards, Prasanna

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5 upvotes·1 comment·5.6K views
Kelvin Devit
Kelvin Devit
·
March 10th 2021 at 7:20PM

+1 Angular Material covers most of the common use cases and the implementation docs are good too.

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A huge component of our product relies on gathering public data about locations of interest. Google Places API gives us that ability in the most efficient way. Since we are primarily going to be using as google data as a source of information for our MVP, we might as well start integrating the Google Places API in our system. We have worked with Google Maps in the past and we might take some inspiration from our previous projects onto this one.

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9 upvotes·439.5K views