New life utility

More than 3 years have passed since the last publication. Unfortunately, there has not been any changes in the project for a long time and in fact it was abandoned. But, at the beginning of this year, having forgotten to pay for hosting, I received many letters and surprisingly it turned out that quite a lot of people use the service throughout the country and even in other countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and others). It was decided to reanimate the project and finalize it. And now, after a few months after reanimation, I want to tell you what has been done during this time and share some plans for the near future.

Engine

Initially, the project was made on Vaadin, which is great for developing enterprise RIA applications with a limited number of users, but in my opinion, it is not very well suited for public services. The first thing that was done was to completely rewrite the service engine for Spring MVC, which turned out to be more convenient for the project and allowed us to add many features faster. It also completely changed the design of the project to a more modern one.
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New opportunities

After transferring all the main functionality from the old site, I started developing new interesting features.

Store scans of payment orders

Added a section for storing scans of payment orders with the ability to bind to the address and specify the sign of payment and now you can not be afraid to forget to pay, because Now you can immediately see which have already been paid, and which are not.

Utilities tariffs

With the placement of utility tariffs, it turned out to be more difficult, maybe I was looking badly, but it seems that in our country this data is protected better than the C400 or Iskander schemes. The data is scattered across many regional resources, there is no single calculator with fully relevant data. So far, as a temporary solution, I have built in the calculator through the iframe, which is provided by the portal of the Unified Information Analytical System eias.fstrf.ru . Not all the data in it are relevant, but it is the most complete and convenient. Although it was not without a case, eias.fstrf.ru certificate is signed by WoSign, and chrome considers them unreliable (more information can be found here: Distrusting WoSign and StartCom Certificates ). Still all the tariffs can be found on the site of GIS utilities, but integration with it is only in the plans so far.

Lawyer consulting

There are cases when there is no legal assistance at all: disagreements with the Criminal Code (let me remind you that it was for this reason that I started developing utility services) or the HOA, problems with my neighbors (for example, they make noise or flood). He enlisted the support of one of the law firms that specialize in housing and utilities issues and are ready to advise service users free of charge, after which he created a small section where everyone can ask questions and get qualified help. In the future I plan to make a handy reference book on the basis of standard questions and answers to them.

Call the repairman home

One more useful opportunity came to us thanks to an affiliate program from Profi.Ru . It is very easy to implement in the form of banners or a widget, and if you need to have more features, then at the request they give out a key to their API. I also considered a partnership with YouDo, but they didn’t have a standard offer, so I settled on only one Pro. Now you can easily select the suitable master from our site and call to your home.

Cards companies UK / Utilities

Initially, each user could add their companies with contact details for linking to the meters and sending readings to these companies via email, which resulted in a small garbage in the directory when the same company could be called a little differently or confused different companies with the same name ( in my little observation, the most popular name for the HOA is “Our Home”). It was decided to prohibit users to add information on their own, and create a single directory for all Russian companies. As a source of information took the site " Housing Reform ", which must report all companies. The site has an API, but for certain reasons, it was decided to parse (if it is interesting to my readers, in one of the following articles I will tell you in detail how the parsing script was written, because there turned out to be some interesting nuances, and the Housing and Communal Services Reform site itself rather unstable and often simply inaccessible, by the way, at the time of writing this article, the reform website was once again unavailable), and now every company has a public card where you can find general contact information on it, and in the future it will appear Ordering information for the managed houses, accountability and the ability to post reviews tenants managed houses.

What is planned in the near future

I will improve the existing functionality, correcting shortcomings and adding new features, for example, new types of counters. There is development of mobile applications for tenants, as well as a personal account for the company and a lot more in the plans.

This concludes the review article on innovations on the site and in the following articles I will already talk about the difficulties and interesting, in my opinion, points that appear during the development of the project.

As before, the project remains completely free and its goal is to create a more transparent and understandable housing and utilities market.

Link to the website: dom24x7.ru