POSIT Developers Wiki
From Notes
Welcome to the POSIT Development Wiki!
POSIT (Portable Open Source Information Tool) is a free and open source mobile information gathering tool for Android phones and tablets. Originally designed as a search tool for rescue workers (and previously named Portable Open Search and Identification Tool), POSIT has evolved into an extensible, general purpose platform for gathering and sharing data.
POSIT allows mobile phone users to tag GPS-marked Finds with text, pictures, and other data. The user's data can be synchronized to and from a central POSIT-server over WiFi or Cellular networks, and it can be transmitted via SMS to other phones or to a Frontline SMS hub running on a laptop.
POSIT is a project of the Humanitarian FOSS, an NSF-funded effort to get undergraduate computing students engaged in building FOSS that benefits the public good. Undergraduates from Trinity College, Wesleyan University, Connecticut College, and a whole bunch of other schools have contributed to POSIT's development.
POSIT consists of two complementary software components: a web server and a mobile app. POSIT-mobile is written in Android. POSIT-server is written in PHP and uses an MySQL database.
If you are ready to jump right in, go straight to the POSIT Repository (Mercurial) on Google Code.
Contents |
Preliminaries: Getting Started with Android
POSIT mobile is written in Android. Google presents a number of useful tutorials to help developers get started with Android.
- Main Site for Android Developers
- Tutorials -- If you are new to Android, start here!
- Developer's Guide (HFOSS student summary of the Android Getting Started Guide)
- Installing the Eclipse Plugin for Android
- The Android SDK
- Android Reference Manual
Setting Up Your Work Environment on Eclipse
HFOSS students have been using the Eclipse development environment for Android.
- Downloading and Installing the Android SDK and Eclipse Plugin
- Downloading and Installing Eclipse for Java and PHP
- Creating an Eclipse Project for Android
- Downloading POSIT from the Google Code (Mercurial) Repository
- Coding and Commenting Conventions
- Where to get help: Android forums and resources
- How to generate a signed APK file for public distribution using Eclipse
Programming Tutorials for POSIT-Mobile
The HFOSS project has created a number of tutorials that expand upon or extend the Android tutorials.
- Tutorial:Understanding the Android Framework
- Tutorial:Hello Android
- Tutorial:Hello Mapview, with GPS
- Tutorial:Camera and Gallery Demo
- Tutorial:Camera/Gallery Part II
- Tutorial:Creating a Contacts Application
- Tutorial:Creating a Camera Application (old)
POSIT Functional Architecture and Components
- Architectural Overview
- Adding, Listing, Mapping Finds
- PositDbHelper
- Background Coverage Tracker
- POSIT/RWG
- POSIT's Tutorial Activity
- Incorporating SMS into POSIT
- Creating a POSIT Screencast
- Incorporating ODK into POSIT
- Incorporating XForms into POSIT
POSIT Plugin Architecture
Getting Started with POSIT-Server
Links to Courses and Summer Institutes
- Chris Fei's Senior Project (YouTube)
- CPSC-225, Fall 2009
- 2009 HFOSS Summer Institute
- 2010 HFOSS Summer Institute
