James Perry - Software Developer

Home Projects Blog About Me

This page lists various projects I've worked on, some were paid work and others are things I've made in my spare time. Each is presented with a short description and a link to the project itself or to further information on the web.

Except where otherwise noted, the projects described on this page were undertaken by me personally in my own time and are nothing to do with EPCC or the University of Edinburgh.

Union Canal Unlocked

The Union Canal Unlocked Project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and local councils, was a project with Re-Union Canal Boats, Scottish Canals and the Scottish Waterways Trust to provide heritage information about the Union Canal from Edinburgh to Falkirk. The project involved creating displays along the canal, a printed booklet, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. I developed both mobile apps as well as an associated website. The apps are written natively for the iOS and Android platforms in Swift and Java respectively, and the website is coded in PHP.

Visit Union Canal Unlocked on the web

Botanic Gardens Station Model

I developed this interactive 3D model during 2016. It allows the user to explore a disused, mostly underground section of the Glasgow Central Railway from their web browser. Information about each section of the railway is displayed as it is reached. I created the 3D model using the free Blender 3D software, and wrote a viewer in JavaScript, using the WebGL API to display the graphics. The model data is converted to a suitable form for the viewer using a Python script.

Visit the Botanic Gardens Station model

Laura Rennie Photography

This website was created to showcase my wife's photography and allow her to post details of her future craft fairs and so on. It is also coded in PHP and is centered around a gallery of many of her images.

Visit Laura Rennie Photography

Interactive Railway Maps

These maps were created in 2015, one showing the Edinburgh area and one Glasgow. They show how the railway networks in the region developed over time. In addition to scrolling and zooming the maps, you can also change the date using a slider and see how the railway routes and stations have changed over time. The map viewer is written in JavaScript and runs in a web page, while the map data was created and edited using a specially written application built on the Qt toolkit.

Visit the railway map for Edinburgh

Visit the railway map for Glasgow

James's Canal Pages

I originally created this website during the Millennium Link Project which restored the Scottish lowland canals to navigation around the year 2000. During the restoration I frequently posted my photographs of the work in progress. Since the restoration work finished the site has been more static, but I gave it a major redesign a few years ago. The new version of the site is coded from scratch in PHP and uses a MySQL database backend. It includes maps of the canals and an extensive photo gallery.

Visit James's Canal Pages

Scottish Canal Guide app

I created the Scottish Canal Guide app for Android in 2014. It provides a guide to the Union and Forth & Clyde canals, giving information and photographs about the many interesting locations along the route. Features include a scrollable and zoomable map, detailed pages about each feature of interest, and an alert system to notify users about current waterway closures and other important information. The app was written in Java using Android Studio and builds on the Google Maps API. A Python script is used to build the guide database and make updates to it.

Scottish Canal Guide on Google Play Store

EPCC Projects

These are some of the projects I have been involved with at EPCC. Only the more recent ones (from the last five years or so) are listed here; the older ones tend not to have active websites anymore, so there's not much there for me to link to.