Inspiration
Coordinating with friends is always a hassle, and frequently there's never anything good to do around the place you decide. I wanted to make an app that will do this all for you.
What it does
Make and account and add friends through their usernames. Then, you can add them to a group, and it calculates the optimal meeting position for you, and delivers you information on places to eat nearby, as well as their ratings.
How we built it
We built a node.js backend which communicates with our SQL database, and uses socket.io to communicate with our clients. Information from SQL passes into the node.js server, to the client, to the client's HTML DOM. On the client side, we used the positions of friends provided by socket.io with the google maps and places API to put them on a map and find places around the optimal meeting position. To find this position, we calculated the centroid all latitudes and longitudes of all clients in a group.
Challenges we ran into
Bugs with the google maps API, trying to get sockets to communicate properly, and stopping infinite loops between the server and clients.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The whole thing was pretty neat. Fixing the glitches mostly.
What we learned
The google maps API is really hard to use, and programming with sockets and mysql needs more time than 10 hours.
What's next for MeetUp
We would add other types of suggestions for places, and put them on the map.
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