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EpiRoom

android python
Table of Contents
An Android app and its Backend to get information about EPITA classrooms availability.

Project Genesis #

At EPITA students can rely on EpiLife, a Mobile application (Android & iOS) to check their timetables.

EpiLife Android app
EpiLife Android app

But timetables are not always full, so during inter-course we were frequently going to unused classrooms to work on school projects / prepare our exams.

Problem: To do so, the only solution was to manually check every classroom to find an available one. Often, 30 minutes after settling in, a teacher would arrived and take over the room 🥹.

From this came the idea of EpiRoom, a Mobile application allowing to see which classrooms are available and for how long (Based on all classes timetables).

EpiRoom Python Backend #

EpiRoom Backend illustration image

For this project, I developed a custom Python backend using Flask and PonyORM, based on a SQLite database.

Three reasons:

  • The school API was mainly designed to deliver classes timetables. Getting information about rooms availability needed multiple requests.
  • I didn’t have official access to the school API and didn’t want to risk causing an unintentional denial-of-service attack 😄.
  • It was an excellent opportunity to learn stuff about backend development 🚀.

This Backend server is responsible of polling the school API every hour to get information about classes timetables, deduce rooms availability from it, store it in a SQLite database and serve all these information through a simple RESTful API.

EpiRoom Android App #

This app has been developed in Java with the help of some well known libraries:

  • Retrofit: A type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java.
  • Butterknife: Field and method binding for Android views using annotations.
  • MPAndroidChart: A powerful & easy to use chart library.
  • …

EpiRoom Android app
EpiRoom Android app

The app follows Material Design guidelines and was designed to address the user’s main need — quickly knowing which room to go to. To do so, the approach was to display these information in the form of a horizontal bar graph, with rooms ordered by availability time.

Conclusion #

EpiRoom was a small side project, but I learned a lot about building full-stack applications and handling real-time data. It also made inter-course time a lot less stressful — no more wandering from room to room! 😄

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