Inspiration
A plethora of students on campus want access to good food sold by student organizations, but never know when and where it will be sold. Furthermore, these student organizations want to be able to sell as much food as possible, whether it be to fundraise money for their organization, for a charity, or for an on-campus event. DailyDevour connects the organizations to the student to help both sides get the most out of their needs.
What it does
DailyDevour is an app and a website that allows organizations to post their food-selling events, and for students to be able to access the events. By viewing both a calendar and a map, students can easily see what events are going on around campus.
How we built it
There are two key parts to our project. The first is the website, which runs on html, css and javascript. Basically it allows for a user to login and create an event on the calendar and the map to advertise their organization's event. A student that is not an organization can view the map and the calendar at all times to find what they are looking for. The second part is iPhone application. It was created using Swift on Xcode. It syncs up with the website to allow students "on the go" to view what events are going on around campus.
Challenges we ran into
The first challenge we ran into was hosting the website on a server. We were able to run a static website on Amazon Web Services, but weren't able to host a non-static website online (which means that if we want to showcase 100% of our project's functionality, it needs to be run locally). We also ran into the problem of adding events to a public calendar. We ended up creating a google account for the product itself and integrating Google's calendar API so that when a user submits an event, it adds it to the calendar.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the fact that we were able to get both a website and an iPhone application running at the same time and that they can sync up. We think that giving users the flexibility to use either a web browser or an app is crucial in today's world.
What we learned
We learned that hosting a website online is a lot harder than hosting one locally :/ No members of the group had ever transitioned a local website into a server one, so that was a new journey for us all. None of us had ever also tried to have a website and an application retrieving the same information before.
What's next for DailyDevour
The next step for DailyDevour is to host a non-static website online and to add a few more features:
- Verification for user logins for a)security and b)consistency.
- Notifications option so students can know when certain events they are interested in are happening.
- A "weekly forecast" feature so students can get an email detailing what is going on the upcoming week.
- Turning the website from a "1990s"-looking one to a more modern one. This will require the group to learn a little more web development than html and css :/
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