PlanR - Plan ahead with our app instead

Have a perfect vacation idea with friends/family, but can’t agree on something? PlanR is a web app that creates an itinerary that meets everyone’s needs, finally making your dream vacation a reality!

Comment

Inspiration

My friends are rather indecisive. We always want to hang out together, however, we are never able to make concrete plans that last until the day of the meetup. For example, for the past year we were planning a trip to a nearby city for camping, however, after a year worth of fruition, the plan fell through because we could not settle on plans that satisfied everyone. We are fixing this problem for everyone with our project!

What it does

Our project is a simple web app where you fill out some basic information about a trip you are planning through a quick 1 minute survey. Then, through our tested algorithms, an itinerary calendar is displayed that plans out the entire trip for you! It includes activities and places to eat. This itinerary will do its best to satisfy all of the trip members' food and activity choices.

How It Is Built

We first used a bootstrap template to get the web app front end started. Along the way, we added a lot of our own custom css, html, node.js, and javascript code to make the UI work the way we wanted it to. APIs: Sendgrid email API Google Maps Javascript and Places API Languages: CSS, HTML, Javascript, Libraries: Moment.js, Bootstrap, jQuery,

Frameworks: Express

Challenges We Ran Into

Alongside the inevitable frustrations caused by trying to satisfy OCD and perfect the css, a major challenge we faced was connecting the front end to the back end through jquery post methods, as none of us had done this before so we had to learn how to get user data. In addition, there were also difficulties in the back-end in determining a fairness system such that each person’s preferences were taken into account equally. Lastly, we believe that some of our ideas were quite ambitious considering our experience, so implementing certain concepts like custom survey URLs was a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud because for 4 of our members, this was our first official 24 hr hackathon! One thing we are really proud of is the UI. It looks really clean, and is very easy to follow for the users, all while being full functional in its tasks. Another thing we are very proud of is our final output itinerary. It would be very easy to just randomly display food and activity choices randomly while loosely adhering to all of the users inputs, but we made sure that all of the users inputs were actually taken into account through a rating based algorithm system. Above all things, we are proud that our web-app is able to deliver custom itineraries that work on any location in the world, and we did not hard-code anything to save time.

PROUD OF TEAMWORK THROUGH OUR BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS

What I learned

We learned a lot about creating post and get requests, http requests, api calls, using endpoints, and in general a lot about how to connect the front end code to the back end code. We also learned how to parse user input data and also about how to compartmentalize our code so that we are able to reduce as much coupling as possible.

What's next for PlanR

We really like the simplicity of the web app, so we don’t want to increase the amount of questions in the survey. Instead, we want to first develop a mobile app that keeps the simplicity of the web app. Eventually, we are gonna make it into a tech unicorn, being paid by the vacation places we suggest.

Interested In Our Code?

https://github.com/Adrian587/HackationProject PlanR is hosted through heroku

Share this project:

Updates