The Architecture of a Ride Sharing Application

摘要

In the development of a lite version of a ride sharing application, we encounter some real time requirements. For example, a rider wants to track the driver's location in real time, once a driver accepts the trip request. Compared to the traditional method in which the driver sends the location every minute to the app server and the rider receives the information every minutes from the server, we used Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) to send messages to client devices in this project. That means the driver sends GCM notification containing the location information to the GCM connection server. Then the information is sent to the rider. As a result, the rider will be able to view the driver's location in real time. The benefit of using GCM is the scalability and performance advantages over the app server. There is also battery life savings for the clients' mobile devices. This paper presents the architectural design of using GCM connection server in a ride sharing application.