BorrowMe is an application which tries to encourage the idea of sharing. This platform has been created for the people who own different objects which they are no longer using, or using rarely and they can lend them for a certain amount of money. This helps the ones that borrow to save an important amount of money by not buying the product or decide if it’s worth buying. Currently, the sharing trend is growing in the actual market, for example Uber and AirBnB, two services which helped the development of the market by making your car and house available to other people. Therefore, we thought that BorrowMe would have a positive impact in this market. The purpose of this application is to get into contact people who wish to lend certain objects in order to make profit, with the people who are not yet convinced to buy a certain object, or do not afford it.
With this application we give the people the opportunity to borrow item from others so that they can save money and avoid buying items they will no longer use in the future. At the same time, the mobile application is intended to let people list items that they are willing to lend to other people for a fixed period. The application has this features: users are able to use the application to create a profile where they list the items they want to lend, along with their availability, users are able to use the application to search for various items they would like to borrow, the application let users reserve a certain item and choose whether they want to collect it or have it delivered, the application allow users to communicate through private or instant messaging in order to keep in touch about the process of lending/borrowing, the application display reviews of the users and filters of the items they are listing.
BorrowMe is a mobile application that was developed using the integrated development environment Android Studio, all the code is written in Java. We choose to use Android Studio in the detriment of Eclipse because it has an incorporate JVM build system, also known as Gradle. The GUI of the application was created exclusively from XML interface elements. In order to handle the database requests the newest technology was used in this sense. The HTTP library Volley made it possible to easily implement fast networking and reduce the memory leaks. This library sends requests to the database via PHP scripts and then it fetches the data in JSON format. All of the data was stored on an online hosting website called 000webhost.com, this platform provides Cpanel, PHP and MySql support which were used in the backend integration for handling data and operations.