With the aim of promoting the use of public transport within the territory of Bizkaia, the Provincial Government of Bizkaia has relied on the help of ZYLK, a partner specialized in Liferay technologies, to develop "Bizkaitik Mugitu". A simple and intuitive PWA (Progressive Web Apps) that allows, based on the location of the users' device, to calculate the best route on public transport between two points using the Google Maps API.
This online portal for public transport has been designed under Liferay DXP in its 7.0 version and has a multi-language platform with content in Spanish, Basque, French and English. It also offers information about the places of interest that are close to each user, location services with the best routes and the timetables offered by the different means of transport within Bizkaia.
Bizkaitik Mugitu is available in both its mobile and desktop versions, with the advantage of being able to access all the services it offers from a single website and without depending on an operating system.
“They are a natural evolution of web applications, and in a way blur the barrier between the web and native mobile applications.”
Aitor Ibáñez Uzkiano
Solution
One of the most relevant characteristics of a content portal like Liferay DXP is its "Headless" architecture. This allows developers to use a REST API and consume portal content from any channel, be it traditional web applications, mobile applications, or wearable devices. This way, a frontend developer can develop a presentation layer with Angular, React JS or Vue JS technologies, while delegating to Liferay DXP the management of users, the content, document or image repository, the forms systems or certain specialized contents.
A twist in this type of web applications that use Liferay as a content backend is their approach as hybrid or progressive applications (PWA), also known as "Progressive Web Applications". Progressive applications are essentially web applications, but through certain devices called Service Workers they behave like native mobile applications. Thus, it is possible to install them on mobile devices as another application, and use the resources of the mobile device. They are a natural evolution of web applications, and they blur in some way the barrier between the web and native mobile applications, being able to perform tasks that generally only native applications could do.
In our approach to PWA we propose web developments, for example in React JS, which are adapted to mobile devices and use native capabilities of mobile devices such as geolocation, audio system, push notification system, or even offline operation. The final application allows its installation as a native application on a mobile device, but directly from the browser, through a launcher, without the need to host them in Apple or Goople stores. This brings numerous benefits from the point of view of development (a single web application, and not three web development environments, Android, iOS), costs (one application versus three), and even different providers.
Public transport application Bizkaitik - Mugitu (Provincial Government of Bizkaia)
Public transport application for Bizkaia, which provides the best routes between two points using the metro, streetcar, bus and train services.
