Hack Day 2017, ‘Let’s Get Physical’, required that every entry contain a hardware component. To meet this requirement, the ‘Onwards Defrosted Tuna’ team decided to leverage the Caplin Platform to enable a web application to initiate and terminate calls on a user’s smartphone.
Inspiration
![BT_Chat](https://blog.caplin.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/BT_Chat.jpg)
Any good hack day entry has the following qualities: it has to be achievable within 24 hours and it has to have the potential to deliver real business value.
We drew our inspiration from a previous Caplin trial project that explored integrating the Caplin Platform with trading turrets to enable traders to initiate and receive calls in Caplin web applications:
Why was this trial project an interesting idea?
- Phone numbers could be stored in the Caplin Platform; sales traders would not need to keep all their clients’ phone numbers.
- The Caplin Platform could record statistics, such as call duration, and persist them for later auditing.
- Notification, client profiles, and rates could be presented automatically when a client called.
The idea never took off, but the trial project became the inspiration for our Hack Day entry. Could we implement a modern version of the project using smartphones instead of turrets?
Hack Day
We managed to create a minimal viable solution in under 24 hours. We wrote a mobile app that initiated and terminated calls on a trader’s smartphone in response to messages sent by a web application over the Caplin Platform.
No turret was required, and all we used was the standard Android SDK and Caplin Platform libraries.
Our solution consisted of the following:
- Mobile app:
- Initiate and terminate calls
- Relay information to and from the Caplin Platform
- Front-end:
- A grid to display available clients
- Phone calls initiated by selecting a client from the grid.
- Display status and caller details on the grid
- Back-end:
- An adapter to receive and execute instructions from the front-end
The main technical hurdles we faced were as follows:
- Requesting the mobile app’s access to phone features and setting the correct security settings
- Rather than running a monitoring background process, the mobile app needed to be kept alive in the foreground. This was not ideal, and given more time we could have solved this.
Final Word
![onwards-defrosted-tuna-trophy](https://blog.caplin.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/onwards-defrosted-tuna-trophy.jpg)
Onwards Defrosted Tuna achieved first place and lifted the coveted Hack Day Cup!