New life of utility services

More than 3 years have passed since the last publication. Unfortunately, for a long time there were no changes in the project and in fact it was abandoned. But, at the beginning of this year, having forgotten to pay for the hosting, I received many letters and surprisingly it turned out that quite a lot of people across the country and even in other countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and others) use the service. It was decided to revive the project and finalize. And now, after several months after resuscitation, 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 perfect for developing corporate RIA applications with a limited number of users, but, in my opinion, it is not very suitable for public services. The first thing that was done was to completely rewrite the service engine on Spring MVC, which turned out to be more convenient for the project and allowed to add many features faster. Also completely changed the design of the project to a more modern one.

New opportunities

After I transferred all the basic functionality from the old site, I started developing new interesting features.

Storage of scans of payment orders

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

Housing and Utilities Rates

With the placement of tariffs for utilities it turned out to be more difficult, maybe I was looking badly, but it seems that in our country these data are better protected than the C400 or Iskander schemes. The data are scattered across many regional resources; there is no single calculator with completely up-to-date data. So far, as a temporary solution, I have built in the calculator through the iframe, which is provided by the portal “Unified Information Analytical System” eias.fstrf.ru . Not all data in it is relevant, but it is the most comprehensive and convenient. Although this could not have happened, eias.fstrf.ru has signed the certificate with WoSign, and chrome considers them unreliable (more information can be found here: Distrusting WoSign and StartCom Certificates) All tariffs can still be found on the GIS housing and communal services website, but integration with it is only planned so far.

Lawyer consulting

There are cases when there is no way without legal assistance: disagreements with the Criminal Code (let me remind you that it was for this reason that I started developing a utility service) or HOA, problems with neighbors (for example, they make noise or flood). I enlisted the support of one of the law firms that specialize in housing and communal services and are ready to advise users of the service for free, after which I created a small section where everyone can ask questions of interest to him and receive qualified help. In the future I plan to make a handy guide based on standard questions and answers to them.

Call home repair technician

Another useful opportunity came to us thanks to the affiliate program from Profi.ru . It’s very easy to implement in the form of banners or a widget, and if you need to have more features, then upon request they will give a key to their API. I also considered a partnership with YouDo, but they did not have a standard offer, so I settled on only one Pro. Now you can easily select the appropriate master from our website and call home.

Cards of UK / Housing Companies

Initially, each user could add their own companies with contact details for linking to meters and send readings to these companies via e-mail, which led to a little garbage in the directory, when the same company could be called a little differently or confused different companies with the same name ( in my small observation, the most popular name for the HOA is “Our Home”). It was decided to ban users from adding information on their own, and create a single directory of all Russian companies. As a source of information took the site " Housing Reform", on which all companies are required to report. The site has an API, but for certain reasons it was decided to parse (if my readers would be interested, then in one of the following articles I will tell in detail how the parsing script was written, because it turned out to be several interesting nuances, and the Housing and Utilities Reforms website itself is rather unstable and often simply unavailable, by the way, at the time of writing the reform site was once again unavailable), now every company has a publicly accessible card on which you can find out the general contact For information on it, and more information on managed houses will appear in future reports and the ability to post reviews tenants managed houses.

What is planned in the near future

I will improve the existing functionality, correcting defects and adding new chips, for example, new types of counters. There is a development of mobile applications for residents, as well as a personal account for the company and much 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, moments 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 communal services market.

Link to the site: dom24x7.ru