One of my client wants to track his cars/cabs from his own house... So i thought of getting help from our fellow users of SO... Is it possible to integrate GPS system in an asp.net web application? If so,How to get started...
EDIT: Any webservice that does it for me? Should i use google maps api? I dont know where to start.. Any suggestion..
The simple answer is yes you can! Look at this link to give you an idea how this works. There are many techniques and this web page explains how you can utilise this type of technology. Howeever you are still going to need to expose some web services and then provide a Google map on webpage that updates its self via AJAX every x seconds.
What Is Personal GPS Tracking?
Personal Tracking is a system, where a person or an commodity can be tracked using devices that are integrated with Global positioning System (GPS) and Global Service for Mobiles (GSM).
You can carry it in your pocket like mobile phone or can install it in your car to get the location on SMS or web based services provided by GPS Integrated.
Most GPRS-enabled vehicle trackers can be configured to send the position data periodically to a remove server. The protocol and the details of the connection will vary a lot between different manufacturers. However in most cases, you should be able to configure the tracking device with the IP address and TCP port of your server, and then you should set up an application at that endpoint that listens for TCP connections from the tracking devices. This back-end application can then push the data it receives into a database, from where your ASP.NET web application would be able to retrieve the data.
The first thing you should check is the documentation of the tracking device, if this was already chosen by your client. The serious brands will even provide working examples and demonstrations.
When you solve that part, and you start getting the data in the database, it will be a matter of serving the information from the database through your ASP.NET web application. To have the vehicles moving in realtime, you should probably look into AJAX or long-polling.
As for Google Maps, note that the you cannot use the free version for vehicle tracking. Article 10.9.C of Google Maps API Terms and Conditions explicitly prohibits using the standard (free) Google Maps API for non-public fleet management and asset tracking. You would need the Google Maps API Premier to legally use Google Maps for these kinds of applications.
As an additional side-note, according to one unofficial source (dated April 2008), the Premier API for vehicle tracking would cost USD 10,000 per year, which entitles you to track 100 vehicles. If you exceed the 100 vehicles, you would need to add USD 24 per additional vehicle per year.