Rutgers Craiglist provides a platform where students can purchase items such as furniture, technologies, tickets, etc. from each other with more exclusivity (you can only sign up with Rutgers email)
Inspiration: My friends and I use Reddit a lot, and a problem we notice is that there are a good amount of posts about students who are looking to buy and sell items. However, these posts received little attention and ended up being ignored. In developing this application, we hope to simplify the process of selling and buying goods within the Rutgers community.
What it does: Rutgers Craiglist provides a platform where you can go on the app and surf through all of the posts for the item that you want. Each post will contain the description, price tag, method of delivery, willingness to negotiate for price, etc. After the transaction has been made, the item will be marked as "sold."
How we built it: For backend, we utilized Nodejs and Express as our framework. For database, we use mongoDB collections to store data from the users, and we use mongoose to interact the database with the server. Then, for front-end, we use the React framework to make API calls to the backend and design the website. Authentication-wise, we use the JSON web token to make sure that the user is signed in. The application is designed in a way that promotes exclusivity. For example, you CANNOT view anything at all if you do not have a valid Rutgers email address. That way, we prevent outsiders from seeing the posts and potentially intending to do something malicious.
Challenges we ran into: we were unable to use the multer middleware for backend, which is a middleware where you can upload images. the code was unable to save the images to the folder that we specify. We spent a good couple of hours this issues, but were unfortunately failed to find a solution. An alternative solution that we think of is to call the Images API just to show an image of the posted item. It is not an accurate representation of how it exactly looks, but it's the best that we could come up with. For front-end, somehow the React did not render the pages when the information arrived from the backend. My team member was unable to fix this issue.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: we built a fool-proof security system so that you cannot bypass the website without valid credentials. Secondly, we have a functional application that works as intended.
What we learned: It is the first time we incorporate different frameworks together. For our team members, some of us only know backend, and some of us only know frontend. So we were able to come together and make the 2 frameworks work together.
What's next for Rutgers Craiglist: we are intending to upscale the app further and add more features such as the search bar, the ability to delete and edit post. we would also like to integrate Google Map API to see which campus the seller is located. And we would make the UI/UX looks much better. Considering the time constraint, we couldn't do much.
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