MBTA Travel Planner

Introduction
Overview

Introduction  

This project was started while taking cscie-259, a course in XML and J2EE. It is the submission for the course final project.

A bit about MBTA, it is the oldest subway system in the US. It provides transportation service for people living in the Massachusetts bay area (Boston and vicinity).

Through this project (MBTA Travel Planner), a user can view a route given the user choose a starting point and an end point.
*) Click link below to see a sample of how the program might operate (svg friendly browser needed).
MBTA Travel Planner sample

Running real time, a user can choose to start and finish from any subway station in the MBTA universe. The program will then search for best route using an algorithm and afterward draw an svg file to be display by the browser.

Please contact me, if you need to see the program in real time.

Overview  

The idea behind this project came up after having done a course project where students need to perform XSLT transformation from XML file to SVG picture format. In that project, students were given an XML file that has information about London's Underground subway system. Next, an XSLT program will use and convey that information to draw an SVG file.

This MBTA project is similar to the London project except that the MBTA project needs to create SVG graphics on the fly.

When running the project real time using Apache or Tomcat server, the path algorithm along with the process of drawing SVG file can be done automatically. The algorithm used to find the best path between the two stations is the breadth first search algorithm with minor adjustments.