Inspiration
Although food is a basic human need, too many people are trapped in a cycle of hunger by forces beyond their immediate control, like poverty, disaster, conflict and inequality. The fight to reduce food wastage and combat world hunger starts with us! Hence, Food Reserve came to the action!
What it does
Our mobile app aims to organize motivated volunteers to deliver food that would otherwise be wasted by markets and restaurants to local shelters and food pantries. It's easy to sign-up, find an open delivery, and serve your community. Our web app aims to connect food markets and restaurants with the local food pantries, facilitating food distribution.
Food givers can register to give food through our site, and can easily submit food lists and view previous delivery requests. To keep from biased and selective sending, the food givers do not know the exact drop-off location through this site. Food receivers can enter their organization's information to be the recipient of these deliveries. This data is written to a database, and the mobile app reads this and sends nearby and open deliveries to the volunteers, who can accept and easily navigate between the two locations.
How we built it
The App: Our team used the Apache Cordova framework for web-based mobile applications. Using a basic template from the Ionic Framework and several APIs such as google-maps to make a simple, feature-rich app for volunteers. We intended to implement an automatically refreshing open delivery list with entries from the database on Azure but were unable to fully implement it on time. The Website: We modified and linked existing bootstrap templates to make foodreserve.com, our service's home base. Google cloud computing platform to write and read relevant information to a database. This includes data on the food Giver and Receiver registrations, delivery data and volunteer user location.
Challenges we ran into
Working on various high-level tech stacks was a challenging yet satisfying experience for us. This project gave us the opportunity to explore and work on something out of our comfort zone. We tried incorporating as many features as we could in this creation of ours, considering every use-case for our clients to get a seamless UX. It was a new experience using Apache Cordova framework since we didn't have much knowledge in that area.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
After overcoming numerous hurdles, we are now much more confident as web developers and proud of being able to contribute to society in an efficient way. Also, completing the project before the deadline is next to achievement for us!
What we learned
We learned the different features of the Apache Cordova framework.
What's next for Food Reserve
- We'll soon deploy our app on Playstore.
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