OneBusAway is remarkably robust, and very complicated. It was built to serve as a complete solution for a single Transportation Agency running in a single timezone. It is a trip planner, an IVR system, a SMS system, and an API data source. Using it as just an API data source for Commuter Dash and Dash v2 is overkill.
After encountering a few limitations of the software including: lack of support for multiple timezones, significant memory usage requirements, issues with the realtime data for departures that occur after midnight, and general confusion with respect to contributing source code, I decided to create my own lightweight version of the API service. This service, written in Node.js, only interprets GTFS schedule data and overlays GTFS realtime data on top of it. It will return only simple JavaScript objects.
Once complete, this project will replace OneBusAway as a transit information data provider for DashServer and will also be the foundation for replacing DashServer with a Node.js version.
