
Show HN: NextJS + Node.js library for location tracking of business assets - kdeorah
https://github.com/hypertrack/placeline-nextjs
======
tyingq
Interesting from a tech perspective, but I would change "business assets" in
the title with "employees" or "workforce".

This is tracking people and their actions, not tracking "stuff".

~~~
kdeorah
Does Uber track the ride or the driver? App users are carrying out work and
the business wants to track work. Asset track and telematics are product
categories used in the industry where work is on the move. This app belongs in
the same bucket.

~~~
tyingq
Their own blog post says "workforce" instead of "business assets".
[http://hypertrack.com/blog/2019/09/09/open-sourcing-
placelin...](http://hypertrack.com/blog/2019/09/09/open-sourcing-placeline-a-
sample-app-to-track-the-movement-history-of-your-workforce/)

------
hockeygeekgirl
How does this compare to the technology typically used by public
transportation companies so we can find out if our bus is late? Cheaper to
implement? Easier to implement? Different features?

------
kdeorah
We built this app to dogfood our location tracking platform. Places visited,
commutes taken, walks to lunches, drives to meetings … really the timeline of
movement from place to place. In the end, we had built a number of useful
backend libraries in NodeJS and frontend libraries in NextJS. Sharing that out
to re-use and re-purpose.

~~~
whycombagator
The README alone is excellent, well done

~~~
agraebe
came across this neat repo: [https://github.com/matiassingers/awesome-
readme](https://github.com/matiassingers/awesome-readme). Great set of READMEs
worth looking at when writing your own

------
akishinevsky
This is a great example of how one can layer an application on top of
HyperTrack location event streaming platform to do display useful data. Once
you have integrated the mobile SDK and started generating location events, you
can start creating applications just like this one to provide richer
experiences.

~~~
agraebe
do you provide any other opensource apps?

~~~
kdeorah
Yes look us up here:
[https://github.com/hypertrack](https://github.com/hypertrack)

------
thomas_raff
Cool project. How would I use another map layer (don't have a google maps api
key)? And why did you deploy to Heroku and not to AWS/GCP/Azure?

~~~
kdeorah
Yes you could use MapTiler or Mapbox or a React component for any other map.
Google is most popular and therefore added to sample.

Heroku is the easiest to get up and running with. PaaS over raw store/compute
when you are getting started.

------
thesanerguy
Have you seen businesses, that want to track assets, move to smartphone based
tracking instead of traditional GPS tracking? Any pros and cons?

~~~
kdeorah
Smartphone is where the work app sits. Making the app location aware serves a
diff need than vehicle connected telematics. The worlds converge a bit but
tandem is more the norm than replacement.

------
omeada
Interesting! Why would you use localtunnel as opposed to ngrok ?

~~~
agraebe
there seem to be quite a few available. I also like telebit. btw, saw a
comparison the other day: [https://www.chenhuijing.com/blog/tunnelling-
services-for-exp...](https://www.chenhuijing.com/blog/tunnelling-services-for-
exposing-localhost-to-the-web/)

