Ration

Inspiration

Choosing where to eat can be impossible and a waste of time, and forget about trying to stay on budget!

What it does

Ration quickly finds the user a location to eat in Hoboken based on the amount of money they plan on spending for that meal.

How we built it

 Ration is a website, thus has a basic structure of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The Ration team used GitHub for version control and various text editors for coding.

Challenges we ran into

 Creating Ration was a hard fought battle. The largest issues were with the back-end development. First, creating and storing information into a MongoDB database proved to be a very tedious mission. On top of that, we needed to use Node.js to communicate with the database server, which cannot be done in browser, so we had to create a Node.js HTTP server to communicate with both the client and the database. Sadly, we were a handful of steps away from completing this structure due to time constraints and could not properly finish the back-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

 We created fully fleshed out website using industry standard techniques such as a functional database server using MongoDB as well as a Node.js HTTP server to handle requests from the client and communicate with the database in an efficient manor.

What we learned

There are too many items to list in this section. Every member of the team gained an improved knowledge of UI/UX design, entrepreneurship, front-end development, and working with servers.

What's next for Ration

 Here at Ration, we believe the sky is our limit. We plan to complete and fully flesh out our database/back-end as well as expand our information to not only cover the restaurants in Hoboken, but the world. The first major addition we would make would be adding user profiles with additional information. This is so the user can specify allergies or dietary options as well as their preferred cuisine. After that, we will expand our database and look for sponsors. Restaurants that sponsor Ration will be able to gain the favor of our restaurant selection process, without making it impossible for those who do not sponsor us to be selected. The largest feature we plan to add will be scheduling a weekly budget of eating out. For example, say a user wants to plan out and entire week of lunch breaks and dinner outings. Ration will be able to select restaurants that meet the users requirements for each of these meals. During that time period, if the user is to stray from the schedule, a simple input of where they ate and how much they spent will allow the dynamic schedule to adapt for the rest of the time remaining to help the user save money and not visit similar restaurants in succession.