Droidkino

Droidkino is an open project started during a Hackathon. At first it was planned as a simple android application to check movie information and movie schedules for Finnkino theaters.

Although this goal was reached, we intend to expand it further. The vision we have is to make it into a social platform for planning trips to the cinema. It would facilitate the whole organisation process: gathering friends, choosing a movie, place and time – maybe even buying the tickets.

Development

The first that was needed is to recover and parse the information provided by Finnkino. More information about the xml format can be found here. Initially that was done by loading the whole XML using a DOM parser. Unfortunately that solution was rather slow when retrieving the xml for all the areas (around 3K lines).

During the following hackathons that was improved by using a SAX parser instead of the DOM. The loading was moved to a background service and a loading toast (popup message) was added to provide some feedback to the user while the parsing is done.

After that more improvements were made to parse all info available from FinnKino API, thus being able to show the movie list, movie detail and schedules. For movie schedules the search funcionality now works for all areas and for different dates (FinnKino updates monthly the xml feeds) so in the best case users can look for movie schedules more than a month in advance.