Booking system

[Igor Kikot 930148]

Good day Europe!

Why VATEUR doesn't have a single interface for booking, which can be accessible for any VA or FIR for integration on site?

 

P.S> Don't talk about vroute.

 

Kind regards,

Igor

_______________________________________________________

sorry about my English

[Torsten Falldorf 924925]

Good day Europe!

Why VATEUR doesn't have a single interface for booking, which can be accessible for any VA or FIR for integration on site?

It´s a good question Igor. I also want know it.... But I think when we start to ask, some guy make this happend for the community

[James O Grady 904153]

Good day Europe!

Why VATEUR doesn't have a single interface for booking, which can be accessible for any VA or FIR for integration on site?

It´s a good question Igor. I also want know it.... But I think when we start to ask, some guy make this happend for the community

 

If you're referring to vroute, some people would like an alternative, and I agree with Igor's calls for a pan-European, or at least pan-VATEUD wide booking system.

[Thomas George 827476]

So do I and it's something I wanted to do actually. However (correct me if I am wrong anyone who knows better than I do), we have a choice of 2:

1) Create a division-wide (or even region-wide) booking system which does not talk to vRoute/VATBOOK, but have it on one central database

2) Carry on as normal and send people to the individual vACC websites to make a booking

 

I entirely agree with your calls, but I have an infrastructural restriction here unless my thinking is wrong.

 

Regards,

[Andreas Fuchs]

Hi there!

 

Exactly: we do have a necessary restriction. VATBOOK wishes to receive bookings from secure sites only. That means that we require "external operators" (=external booking sites) to make sure that they know who is booking ATC- and flight-slots, which in turn means: you have to have an account and login somehow. At the moment we do not have that at VATEUD.

 

In the last few months I have been approached by several individuals who expressed their wish to create such a common booking-website or interface, but although all the necessary information was provided to them, nothing has come out of it so far

[Thomas George 827476]

Andreas,

 

That authentication is actually available and is used at vACC Management Level for a few things.

 

If it's something you'd like to pursue with me and your colleagues, send me an email.

 

Cheers,

[James O Grady 904153]

VATUK have their own booking system which also talks to vroute, so it should be possible for VATEUD to have it's own booking system which also has it's bookings shown in vroute. Maybe VATEUD could discuss a possible merger of a booking system with VATUK? Either way, even if its just a VATEUD-wide booking system, its obviously possible for it's bookings to be shown in vroute.

Edited May 16, 2009 at 03:14 PM by Guest

[Andreas Fuchs]

Hi,

 

that sounds nice! As long as no user can book a position without logging in, it will satisfy VATBOOK's data-safety requirements.

 

In an ideal world, someone would program something similar to the old Euro-book-net Website for VATBOOK.

[Thomas George 827476]

Yes, but VATUK are one organisation without suborganisations. vACCs in Europe have their own systems which communicate with VATBOOK and as I see it, we need to either act as one conglomerate organisation, i.e. VATEUD or vACCs can manage bookings on themselves.

 

Again, I am no expert in this field but I have skimmed the surface on this topic.

 

Regards,

[Andrzej Stachlewski 104848]

Thomas, I think it's not in fact the booking system that VA's or anyone other wants, it's just the table with already booked ATC throughout Europe. Coding system beeing able to gather information from different vacc's would make it.

[Andreas Fuchs]

Hi,

 

it does not matter: if you book through VROUTE or through your local VACCs website, all the data goes into the same database of VATBOOK. You can also book flights, it is meant for both pilots and ATC.

[James O Grady 904153]

What if you can't use vroute because it keeps giving a script error which you can't fix, and your local vACC doesn't have it's own booking system? Thats why I think there should be a pan-VATEUD alternative.

[Andreas Fuchs]

There should be a central place for the whole of VATSIM...give us a new VATSIM-website and add this feature.

[James O Grady 904153]

There should be a central place for the whole of VATSIM...give us a new VATSIM-website and add this feature.

 

That would be great, if it didn't take years to get done .

[Thomas George 827476]

Well, perhaps I could highlight this thread to our new VP Web Services.

 

I'll drop him a line.

 

Cheers,

[Mike Evans]

Well, perhaps I could highlight this thread to our new VP Web Services.

 

 

I'm here

 

A VATSIM-Wide booking/reservation system is a great idea, and it is already on my list of projects for the future.. however this list is relatively long at the moment, and other things must come before this, but I think we'll see it eventually..

[Andreas Fuchs]

Hi Mike,

 

well, we have the database, we just need a web-interface with a secure-login or validation of identity. So if users can submit their web-flightplan with their VATSIM ID and VATSIM-PW, why don't we give them the possibility to also book their flight on VATBOOK? Of course there needs to be a function to cancel or modify bookings as well, but this should be a small thing.

[Andreas Fuchs]

As a consequence at least VATSIM Europe should go ahead and offer a place where members can book ATC- and Flight-Slots through a web-based interface, so it is accessible for all users, regardless of their platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever).

 

If someone is seriously interested in creating such a thing, please contact me. There will be some conditions as to avoid the troubles that we had and are still having with Euro-Book.net, but they will be based on common sense.

[Igor Kikot 930148]

I don`t wanna cross the bridge before I come to it, but we (Ukrainian vACC) almost finish our booking system. Now we must make choice work with vatbook or not, because have some problem with it...

So... if all agree here, we present our system (as soon as possibly) and start integration in Europe and Asia.

[Andreas Fuchs]

Hi Igor!

 

Who else do you want to cooperate with? At VATSIM there's only one booking-database and that is VATBOOK

[Igor Kikot 930148]

Hi Andreas!

 

we creating booking for all VATRUS, but we hope it's will be booking for Europe and Asia.

 

well, if so, we need the scripts of address to the base of VATBOOK, parameters of record and receipt of information from DB. only not in XML.

[Peter Ingerslev Nielsen]

Guys,

 

I have been away for a week on business and am reading this with interest.

 

VATEUD can certainly set aside server space and integration for this if needed, can the principals, ie Igor, Andreas etc send me an email and we can start discussing the needs and implementation.

 

Peter

[Igor Kikot 930148]

Peter,

it will be very good, because our Ukrainian providers are not reliable (for them yet mesozoic era)

When we will make off testing, I will write a release and then will begin a collaboration for the transfer of

scripts to you site and integrations by all.

 

P.S>How correctly - "for them yet mesozoic era" or "mesozoic era for them yet"? Sorry, but I learn English again and again.

[Thomas George 827476]

"for them it's still the mesozoic era"

[Michal Rok]

@Igor: you've been trying to implement a connection with VATBOOK since many months, and on average once a month you send me a message with another trouble that you ran into and you ask me to solve it (and I always tried to help). If you're not skilled enough as a programmer to implement an interface that has been out there since a few years and plenty of people plugged into it, think again before starting to write a new thing from scratch. Asking "give me something but not XML" is not a technical requirement, is a sign of lack of skills to read XML.

 

@All:

 

If there's something missing in VATBOOK that stops you from using it for the purpose you want, why don't you let me know so that we could see if it can be added? What's the point of creating a new booking system in a world that already has too many of them?

 

I'm not a great fan of todays interface for ATC-side VATBOOK. It's been designed a long time ago with a very strange concept of browser redirections. On the other hand, the pilot-side VATBOOK designed by Arek Olesiak is reasonably modern, and except for returning a plain-text response rather than XML could be considered up to today's standards. Anyway, there's a machine interface available and you can submit whatever you like from the back of your application, and you can query any way you like (some new options were added recently to accommodate requests from users). Theoretically a VATSIM website front-end could also plug into VATBOOK for storage and distribution of information, to leverage channels that already exist (i.e. vroute, Servinfo, VACC websites and others).

 

VATBOOK does not require that you authenticate your users. It's simply more convenient to place bookings on behalf of such users, because you can allow them to i.e. edit what they submitted previously. But the VATBOOK interface alone puts full trust on the external operator to handle his entries with sufficient care and does not require authentication on its own. The authentication topic alone does not sound like a major issue when in over 57.000 ATC bookings and 187.000 flights there has been no single complaint for unauthorized change.

 

 

Michal

(the guy who wrote today's VATBOOK and maintains it)