ZoneDeals! : An innovative way of providing offers

Abstract: The project described in this thesis implements a position based offer system that allows the user to receive offers when they enter zonesspecified in a database. The goals associated with this project were: to find and evaluate products with similar functionalities and to design and implement a working prototype. The system consists of four main parts, a smartphone, a server, a website, and a billing system. The smartphone is based upon the Android operating system and uses the global positioning system (GPS) to track its position. The server is the brain of the system and all the other devices communicate through it.The server runs JBoss and has a connection to an Oracle database through hibernate. JavaServer Pages (JSP) is used by the server to generate the website and to connect the Java methods with the HTML-forms at the website. User privacy is one aspect that has been investigated in relation to this project. The user should have options to choose the information that is to be shared and stored. When storing private information it is important to secure the information, preferably by encryption and a log in system. A small program was developed to test the scalability of the server and the result showed that the server could cope with 1000 simultaneous users polling the server with a 5 second interval.This will, however, increase several times when a dedicated server machine is used. Today there is no other product at the market that has a connection to the billing system; this means that this product will have a huge advantage and market potential compared to similar products.