CHEM-X

CHEM-X is a site dedicated to exploring novice chemistry. It's primary functions are to explore the periodic table and to find weight of a chemical formula. However, I aim to expand functionalities.

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Inspiration

This project grew inspiration from both a computer science course I took that worked closely with databases and a general chemistry course I took over the winter. With little experience and little incentive to taking chemistry as a computer science major, during class, I often wondered how I could explore novice concepts of both at the same time. Thus, CHEM-X was born. It is far from perfect and by no means is fully functional, but its existence is a testament to curiosity and expansion of knowledge.

What it does

CHEM-X is a website with two main functionalities. The first is to search through a database containing all elements of the periodic table by atomic number and printing out more information including the chemical's name, chemical symbol, and formula weight. The second is to take an input of the chemical formula of a compound and output its formula weight.

How I built it

First, and foremost, the database that holds all critical information needed to run this website was built with the software MySQL Workbench and OpenOffice. All the code both frontend and backend was developed on the NetBeans 8.2 IDE. While, it is not my favorite and is definitely an outdated version, it was sufficient enough to organize my code into one place. The front-end of this website utilizes mostly HTML5 and CSS3, while the back-end is built off of PHP, SQL, and a tiny bit of JavaScript. Last, the website is ran on a local server XAMPP.

Challenges I ran into

Timing is a big challenge I ran into during this project. I had trouble dedicating enough time to this hackathon as I would have liked due to work and school commitments. However, with the time that I have in spare, I am at least proud to have a semi-functional website. In terms of the functionality of the program, definitely passing data between frontend and backend is concept that is very foggy for me right now as I was just recently introduced to working with backend programming. Therefore, I still am having an issue getting the Molecular Weight Calculator to work properly as I am still evaluating how to manipulate the data in the database in order to calculate the chemical formula given by the user.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm definitely proud of building the periodic table database by hand, and getting it to connect to the website efficiently. This is one of the first successful times that I've been able to do that on my own since learning the concepts, and I would like to continue exploring how to better do so in bigger projects later on. I'm also proud of the visual aesthetics of the overall website. It is is definitely one of my better works in terms of choosing color scheme and whatnot.

What I learned

Along the way, I learned where to look for resources to better expand on the skills I need to acquire to understand fully the relationship between frontend and backend of a program.

What's next for CHEM-X

The next step for CHEM-X is to go back to development and finish the Molecular Weight Calculator before anything else. Later on in the future, I am interested in creating a function within the website dedicated to visualizing different types of bonds between chemicals. Overall, I think this project is a useful exploratory study tool that I can continue to expand upon little by little.

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