Vehicle Tracking App
A handy extension to the Locator platform that puts your fleet’s information right into your pocket.
A handy extension to the Locator platform that puts your fleet’s information right into your pocket.
The Vehicle Tracking App is the mobile companion to FSS's Locator platform, an in-house GPS vehicle-tracking system (the proprietary fss/locator 'Online GPS Tracking System'). The platform's web back office already let fleet operators watch their trackers, but operators needed the same fleet information on the move. FSS extended the Locator server with mobile-facing endpoints so a phone app could show live vehicle status and trip history without opening the full web console.
Two server-side surfaces back the app, both implemented in the Locator codebase. An XML interface for the iPhone client (controllers/xmlIPhone.php) returns the live state of each tracker — name, online/outdated status, latitude/longitude, speed and engine on/off — plus per-vehicle daily totals (trip count, distance, moving time, first-start time) and detailed per-trip breakdowns including each GPS update point. A separate per-organisation 'Trips' app interface (controllers/tripsApp.php) is key-authenticated and returns trips for a given vehicle and day as JSON, lets the user tag trips as work or personal (individually, in bulk, or by date), and reports monthly work-versus-personal distance sums — a mileage/business-travel logbook in the user's pocket. Administrators enable the Trips app per organisation and can set a cut-off date before which trip classifications are locked.
Technically the app is a thin mobile client over the existing Locator back end: the FSS-built PHP application on the in-house fss/framework (v4), reading from the platform's IBM DB2 database over ODBC, with the device receiving XML (for the iPhone tracker views) and JSON (for the Trips app). Per the repository's commit history the work dates to around 2017 and was iteratively refined for the iPhone, including timezone handling, trip-time display and mileage in the app header. The native mobile-client app itself is maintained outside the repositories reviewed here, so its on-device UI framework was not verified; the verifiable evidence covers the GPS tracking platform and the mobile APIs it exposes.