Inspiration - So basically the members have an issue of eating lunch alone or have trouble organizing lunch meet-ups with friends during the school week, between classes and all. Down to Lunch is ideally the solution to this, by providing you with information on every one of your friends, informing you whether they are in the same position as you (lonely and longing for someone to eat with) or not.
What it does - DTL is a mobile application that connects users to their Facebook accounts to access full name and friends list. After log in, a map appears with locations of friends that are DTL and time spans of when they are free to eat. The application also allows for the user to post his own location and time spam to eat, in case the user does not find a friend that user wants to eat with.
How we built it - For backend, Node.js was used to store data into MongoDB. The database stores documents that hold the first name, last name, and coordinates of a user who is DTL and requests to be placed on the map. Frontend consists of a React-Native framework that allows for cross-platform compatibility. Express.js was used to help route Node.js to React-Native, allowing for give and take from the database and use of it in the user interface.
Challenges we ran into - Using the Facebook login API was a bit of a challenge in the backend more than in the frontend. Since React-Native is made by Facebook, there was some clear documentation on how to use the login API with it, but using passport.js in the backend to access the Facebook data needed was not natural for us and we ended up leaving it to the end, after everything else was done.
Accomplishments that we're proud of - Routing in Node.js and successful exchange of information was a huge accomplishment since it was something new for us.
What we learned - We learned how to use Node.js in an app development situation! Node.js is a generally new concept for us, so we learned a lot on how it works and how it works with MongoDB and Express.js, which was totally awesome. We also learned to implement APIs into the frontend, in particular the Google Maps API, which is used for finding friends in the area that are DTL.
What's next for Down to Lunch (DTL) - Hopefully full implementation of the Facebook API will happen in the future; we have it set up in our code, but do not actually use it, so it would be nice to actually access friend lists and full names through the login API.
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