Roameo

Inspiration

Traveling is a wonderful thing, but like all luxuries, it comes with its difficulties. Having smushed some last-minute vacations into the two weeks of summer we had, we learned that the hard way. Through Roameo, we wish to combat the stress of planning trips, especially between friends and families!

What it does

Roameo is, in a nutshell, a trip-planning website. Its interface sees a calendar on one side and a map on the other, which allows all users to plan routes seamlessly. Additionally, it implements a feature that allows for real-time collaboration. This has the potential to decrease misunderstandings between the vacation go-ers and speed up the planning process. A Facebook messenger bot is also implemented with the hopes that it will provide even more convenience to Roameo's users.

How I built it

Our project takes advantage of the Google Maps JavaScript API in order to provide an easy and familiar user interface. Furthermore, information is written to the Real-time Database Firebase which opens the doors to collaboration. This allows for trip-planning to be more excitement inducing than it is stress-inducing. A lot of our extra features, such as an authentication service and Facebook messenger bot, used Facebook's APIs. The messenger bot also required a cloud platform, which we used Heroku for. The design was all done in HTML/CSS.

Challenges I ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was the number of errors that weren't blatantly obvious. For example, server-side mishaps. Servers were also quite new to us, so it took quite a while for us to get used to their structures.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Although there are many areas that require improvement and more rigorous testing, we are quite proud of our ability to incorporate all the technologies we used into one platform. We are proud of our UI and the overall usability of the website.

What I learned

One of the things we learned was to always follow a task through. For example, learning about webhooks was very confusing and really tested our patience. We ended up, however, finding more trouble as we had a very shallow understanding of them while trying to utilize the technology with other ones.

What's next for Roameo

Although we are proud of what we accomplished, we did originally plan for much bigger. There are still many bugs that arise from the utilization of Firebase when more than one person is working on the plan, so we do wish to stabilize those. Other than that, we were looking into a feature that reorganizes your travel plans based on last-minute accommodations (e.g. if you were running late one day). Additionally, we hope to give more functionality and life to our messenger bot.