Tell the world know whether Andrew Lorien is at the Petersham Bowling Club, or not.
A many-layered app by Andrew Lorien, from an idea by Dylan Bevis with help and humorous suggestions from my friends at CompliSpace and, of course, the bowlo.
The easiest way to do this would have been a 10-line index.html with 10 lines of CSS. I update the html from my phone or laptop or whatever when I enter or leave the club. Simple.
- An app on my phone checks my GPS coordinate every few minutes : because GPS is the obvious solution and I don't have to update it manually. As Cathy says "I don't trust this thing unless I know your phone is doing it automatically"
- If I'm close to the club it makes an HTTP request to an AWS API Gateway with a yes/no parameter : because if you want to trigger a Lambda function from a custom URL you need a gateway
- The Lambda function gets a yes or no parameter : because integrating the app directly to S3 looked difficult, and I might want to transform the data a little bit (like no="he was there a few minutes ago but now he's not"). Also I like Lambda
- The Lambda function writes a little json file to an S3 bucket : this is the application state. At the moment it just has a state (intended to just be "yes" or "no" but it could be anything) and a timestamp
- A static nodejs app checks that file every few minutes and updates the website : because
- Cloudfront delivers that website to the world : because you can't have SSL on an S3 website, you need a proxy and CloudFront is a good one
One day, when the CloudFormation is perfect (and deals with all the wait conditions and SSL type stuff), I'll be able to turn this into the general form : Is At The .
You would need an Android phone, and the ability to load an app not from the store. You would need an AWS account. I would need to add a few parameters (should one of them be a gender pronoun? should i change "ishe" to "isshe"?). You would need to add the GPS coordinates of the place you go. But everything else should work for anybody, anywhere.