Project Overview

The Buddy Positioning System we created is a Pocket PC application that displays a contact list much like an instant messaging application, but instead of messaging, our application displays geographic information so that you know the relative locations of all your contacts.  The GPS device we had access to during development was amazingly weak, so we were not able to integrate actual gps readings into our application.  Instead, we have text boxes for decimal GPS coordinates.  When a broadcasting user updates their contact list, their coordinates are sent to the server machine through an exposed web service.  The web service stores user and location information in a SQL database.  The web service also generates contact list xml to send back to the client Pocket PC application.  The client application receives the xml, saves it to a local xml file, and parses the xml contact list for display.  Locations can be set up so that any contacts within the specified radius of the location will be shown as in the location instead of by raw GPS coordinates.  Alert mode causes messages to pop up if the user is within 2 miles of another user on their contact list.