Total Beginner trying to use GTFS-rt data on a website

[David Song]

Hello, everybody. 

I'm a student who is currently totally new to any format of APIs. 

However, when I'm trying to use GTFS-rt data on a website, I have no idea where i should start from. 
I'm trying to show how many minutes there are left for a bus to come for a specific bus stop. 
How should I do it? 

I have read the protobuf document by google and followed the steps but I'm not quite sure how i'm supposed to use GTFS' .proto file and GTFS-rt's json file to display data on a website. 

It would be grateful to get any help from the gurus. 

Thank you!!

[David Song]

Oh to add on, I only worked with HTML, JS for web development so I only looked at the JavaScript documents of the protbuf. Can I use other languages(ex. Java, Python) to create the website? Also, is there any possible way for me to not use the proto?? Thank you!

[Stefan de Konink]

On Monday, March 20, 2023 8:00:34 AM CET, David Song wrote:
> Oh to add on, I only worked with HTML, JS for web development so I only
> looked at the JavaScript documents of the protbuf. Can I use other
> languages(ex. Java, Python) to create the website? Also, is there any
> possible way for me to not use the proto?? Thank you!

Practically you take a backend process (Java, Python, NodeJs, etc.) to
download the .proto file and transform it in the backend into a message
which you can display on the client. This message could be a HTML page, a
JSON message, etc. you could obviously show the protofile as whole to the
client but you must understand that mean you will transfer an entire
database to a single user, which may only be interested in a single bus
stop.

So in terms of design:

backend
0. process the 'base' GTFS file
1. download .proto fol GTFS-RT
2. transform .proto into a database or separate files, a language binding
will help you <https://github.com/MobilityData/gtfs-realtime-bindings>

frontend
1. interact with the backend to filter for a specific selection

--
Stefan

[Walter Jenkins]

This is a great blog post from a dev at esri that explaning bringing in PB's in the browser. Specifically he is looking at vehicle locations. The only gotcha is that when you are developing you may get a CORS error.

https://gavinr.com/protocol-buffers-protobuf-browser/

[E Sall]

David,

It can certainly be intimidating to get started with protobuf encoded data - even to read it you need to know a few things that aren't necessarily obvious.  I just grabbed a few of the functions that I tend to use to just scan data (not in any production capacity) and turn them into pandas dataframes to review and put them in a public gist: https://gist.github.com/e-lo/7a2aa41ba361dba1f2525e9964eae1b0

Notes: 

- there are certainly more efficient and elegant ways to do this...I'm by no means. a computer scientist or expert in any way, but I did want to share something that I figured out that worked for me in hopes that it might save others some time.

- I copied/pasted various code snippets to the gist so it might take some editing to work for you...I haven't debugged it in any way.

Best,

E

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[Sandro Batista]

Hi David,

With Mapify IoT you can easily, without any code, connect to your GTFS RT feed, create your information layers and even a no-code web application.

We have a lot of tutorials here but feel free to send me a DM.

Best,
Sandro