Gulliver powers Lonely Planet’s Trippy travel planning apps

Gulliver is an open source platform from Google that helps users plan trips in real time with their friends. Using Gulliver, you can create applications for mobile, iGoogle, and mobile web platforms that make it easy to build and share itineraries using Google Maps resources and Lonely Planet recommended itinerary items.

You can use Gulliver to:

• Create, share, and sync trips between the AppEngine web application, iGoogle, and the Android application
• Create scheduled and unscheduled trips
• See Lonely Planet recommendations for hotels, activities, sights, restaurants, and more for top destinations
• Seamlessly show parallel Google results when there are no Lonely Planet results
• Rate and comment on items
• Create custom items
• On iGoogle, drag and drop items from the map into the itinerary list
• On Android phones, take photos from within the app

A fully functional consumer app has been built on the Gulliver code base: Lonely Planet’s Trippy. Trippy combines the travel expertise of Lonely Planet with the power of Google web search and Google Maps.

Trippy for iGoogle (click image to enlarge)

Trippy for mobile web (click image to enlarge)

Guilliver was created as a 20% time project, a well-known part of our philosophy and company culture which enables engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren't necessarily in our job descriptions. We can use the time to develop something new, or if we see something that's broken, we can use the time to fix it. And now you can take these open source apps and run with them! We’re making that possible by rolling them out to the open source community under the Apache license.

Want to get involved with Gulliver and help us make it an even better application? Join the Gulliver team! To get started, just visit our project page, join the community, and download the code.

By David Yu Chen and Alex Cuthbert, Google Gulliver 20% time team