Happiness Farms Online Platforms

Empowering our local Chinese farmers by utilizing digital platforms.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this project first began with our consideration of the American workers that are the backbone to our community. The answer was clear: farmers. Farmers, although the crucial building blocks of our economy who also provide us with the food we need every day, often struggle to reach a broad audience. Often their local businesses are outpaced by large corporations. One of the reasons why is because of their limited expertise with the internet and digital age. Our goal was to provide a way to support these farmers by utilizing our digital expertise to create a platform.

What it does

The app and website both provide the same functionality. Our product has two parts: the business side and the user side. It is designed to be user-friendly, efficient, and organized for both sides. The goal is to allow our farmers to easily organize and manage their businesses, benefitting everyone.

*The user side: * -home page: broadly discusses the business, workers, and goals on the front page. This helps develop a connection and trust among customers -events page: lists the schedule for both pick and delivery, which also includes location and time -products page: lists produce items available, as well as their stock and price -reviews page: company reviews displayed to customers -place order page: allows customers to directly place an order on the app

*The business side: * -management schedules page: provides a way to create events and add their details -view orders page: allows the business to see orders -manage products page: includes a way to add products and their details -view stats page: allows the business to see popular products and other metrics -view reviews page: includes a way to view reviews

How we built it

*Project planning: * led by Michelle Lan, who developed an outline of the site and its functions, along with the detailing of classes and instance variables to help in coding.

*The back-end development: * coded by Henry Wang, utilizing Java. A UML diagram is attached below that illustrates the data management structure.

*The front-end development: * coded by Mithun Dhanasuthan, along with Siwei Li and Michelle Lan using Javascript to create clean, uesr-friendly, and functional GUI.

Challenges we ran into

One of our members ended up extremely ill during the process, 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 front-end and connection with back-end 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 languages themselves, 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 to develop 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 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 back-end with front-end code. We learned about Springboot and tried to have Java back-end send information to data repository, which the front-end would use. 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.

Additionally, we hope to implement the back-end portion and use algorithms to find the best location to station a truck for pick-up and optimalizing delivery routes.

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