Neighborhood Watcher

This is a web application that tracks details about the homes and vehicles in your neighborhood.

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Inspiration

This is an application I've thought about working on for a while now, but never got around to it. Several years ago, I had an attempted break-in at my home (I was home, and scared the guy off). For a long time thereafter, and usually during my daily dog-walking, I would give houses and cars in my neighborhood a pretty good look, keeping an eye out for criminal activity. An app like this would help facilitate collection of that data.

What it does

Allows a user to browse details about homes and vehicles in the neighborhood, and also forms to enter those details.

How I built it

Worked on this solo. Experimented at first to hold data in session, and then developed one page at a time. Had a bit of fun creating all the enums for vehicle and home data-entry.

Challenges I ran into

I wanted to spend a bit more time working on the front-end (for this hackathon), so I decided to hard-code data in the application session instead of spending time working on database integration (schema design, connectivity, seeding, etc). Putting all the data into session requires a lot of careful tedious work, because it isn't something you would normally do.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Improving knowledge with Bootstrap and Thymeleaf. Being able to click around the entire app without any crashes.

What I learned

A lot about positioning in Bootstrap, including use of radio buttons. How to render enum values via Thymeleaf into radio button and select fields.

What's next for Neighborhood Watcher

Need better component for attaching vehicles to homes while making observation records (should support thumbnail images and multi-selection, maybe even a drag-and-drop). Definitely need to have a mobile version to enable data-entry during walking the neighborhood...already have plans to develop a "walk mode" to automatically sequence houses for data-entry while walking on programmed routes.

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