设施预订系统

Question

We are planning to implement a facility booking system wherein the user would be able to check the availability of a hall/room at a particular date and time. The user would also be able to book a facility if it is available.

However, I am having issues in creating two components for the system:

1. Calendar - The calendar needs to be dynamic, such that the user can book the room with a mouse click after specifying the duration through mouse drag. Also, the mouseover should display the event info, so that I do not need to put the event details in some other static page/link. Lastly, the calendar needs to be flexible enough to display availability of the rooms/halls sorted by day, week, and month.

2. Booking through SMS - Whenever a room is booked, an SMS is to be sent to a specific user (selected). The user can then reply to the SMS to book the room (mentioning the unique request ID in SMS response). However, I have never created an SMS server, so I wanted to know how to begin, and whether it is feasible to make an SMS-based response system.

Please share your views or any source code you know is available which takes care of any of these requirements.

Answer 1

1. PHP has plenty of date and time related functions which can help you generate your calendar. You could also find an open source project with a calendar you like and see how they did it.

2. There are service providers for SMS. You simply call a URL (like http://smsservices.com/send.php?message=YOUR_MESSAGE&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY&number=RECIPIENT_NUMBER) and the SMS gets sent by them. Receiving is equally easy: They give you a unique number your users can send messages to. If they receive a message they either call a URL of your website (like http://yoursite.com/receive_sms?message=MESSAGE&number=SENDERS_NUMBER) or send you an email with the message sender's number and message. Just search around Google and you'll find a suitable service provider in your area.