Uniqtracking

We created an online GPS-tracking system with complex logistics functionality, including fleet management, driver logs tracking, online real-time vehicle tracking, alarm sending on theft, speed limit, moving into/out of defined zones, and other specific situations. The software displays a real-time position of any vehicle with the GPS device installed. And what’s more, the Uniqtracking system stores all reported data and makes it available throughout the entire lifetime of the device.

• The system was designed with a modular (microservice) architecture in mind. This simplifies development since most of the time only one or two modules are impacted by the changes.

• Data processing can be done in parallel. This allows distributing it over multiple servers if needed, creating the possibility to process unlimited amounts of data and support very large numbers of GPS devices. While this was not needed for the initial capacity of the system, building it with this functionality already in place allowed the system to remain relatively unchanged over the years while still being perfectly capable of handling the ever-increasing load.

• An event store database was selected for storing all changes happening in the system. This has allowed simple addition of new features that are compatible with the system. All existing events can be re-processed with new functionality and the updated data can be immediately displayed. This may be hard to grasp, so here’s a simple hypothetical example: let’s say we have a list of customers in the system and we’re interested in knowing when each of these items was created. We can add new functionality that includes creation date along with the rest of customer information on the customer entry in the database. We can then reprocess all the customer creation events in the event store and update all existing customer data with their original creation date.