InfoRep

We designed a modular display page with the ability to parse information from various APIs

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Inspiration

We wanted to build something cool within the time constraints that we could see ourselves using. We wanted something with a lot of expandability and modularity to it to allow us to do more with it down the road.

What it does

Right now it serves as a basic information display with a couple starter api callers. Currently it grabs information about currency exchange rates and some weather information. It caches the data from the apis to prevent multiple calls for the same data. It also allows the user to specify the type of currency they would like displayed for the stocks page.

How we built it

We used a LAP stack for this project. Using javascript, css, and html for the front end with a php back end. The website is served using Apache2 and we currently use Json for the data caching.

Challenges we ran into

We had some issues with parsing and formatting the data. We had some merge issues later down the line as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The style and sidebar of the site is something we really like and the ability to specify and modify the currency rates is a start in where we wanted to go with the project.

What we learned

Two of our team members were using completely new languages and were learning on the fly, we also had to set up the development environment and decided to use git to collaborate the code. Using json files was a first for any of us as well as formatting chunks of data from apis.

What's next for InfoRep

Modularity is our big focus, we want to provide a easy to use interface for creating addons to the site. We really want to allow the user to customize what they want on their screen and want to provide a tool box to enable that. Now that we have most of the ground work set, just working on getting the code to a more modular state would be the right step. We also plan to expand our caching to support for a SQL database instead of JSON files to allow for the project to scale a lot better with more information. We also would like to ass some security features that would allow greater accuracy to the information being displayed.

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