Happiness Farms App and Website Pitch

An innovative app and website to boost sales and efficiency for a local business.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project first began when we were thinking of the workers that are the backbone to America and many other countries. Our first answer was clear: the farmers. Our goal was to provide some way to support these farmers utilizing our digital expertise.

What it does

The app and website both provide the same functionality. Our product has two parts: the business side and the user side. The user side first introduces the business's workers and goals on the front page. Additionally, it provides a user-friendly list of produce items to purchase along with a schedule for pickup and delivery. The business side provides an easy way to manage the business, such as through an easy way to create events, view best-selling items, and add/delete produce items.

How we built it

Project planning was led by Michelle Lan, including an outline of the site and functions, along with the detailing of classes and instance variables to help in coding.

The back end development was coded by Henry Wang, utilizing Java. A UML diagram is attached below.

The front end development was coded by Mithun Dhanasuthan and Siwei Li using Javascript to create clean, functional GUI.

Challenges we ran into

One of our members ended up extremely ill during the last few days, so as a team we had to quickly learn how to develop the front end portion using an unfamiliar language on a time crunch. We also had to completely learn some of the frontend and connection with backend code from scratch.

Additionally, scheduling online meetings was difficult, especially due to our conflicting schedules.

Unfortunately, we were unable to connect the backend API successful even despite having ngrok websites (or localhost websites) having the same metadata and working websites

Three of our members, although they had experience with the coding languages, had also never created a website at all. This was definitely a major hurdle in the process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An accomplishment we are all proud of is working together in developing a genuinely useful app through teamwork.

Each of our members has also stepped out of their comfort zone and experienced their own challenges in the development of this app, ranging from learning a whole new programming language to creating an app for a business. We consider our personal growth worth a major accomplishment.

What we learned

We learned to quickly adapt, evident through our ability to create an app off of very little experience. This also allowed us to tackle challenges and simplify certain parts which we didn't have the expertise nor time to code.

We also had to learn how to connect Java backend with frontend code. We learned about Springboot and tried to have Java backend be able to send information to data repository where frontend will just use that information. We also learned fundamental aspects of software design like Junit testing and UML diagrams

We learned to collaborate well, which was very necessary when our teammate fell ill.

What's next for Happiness Farms App and Website Pitch

We hope to refine our product by making it more visually appealing and easier to use. One of the ways we can enhance its user-friendliness for the business side is to include a live preview of the updates for the them to see changes in real-time. Once we complete this, we hope we can also make the app customizable for it to be versatile for all small businesses.

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