Inspiration
Upon hearing all the pitches during the HACC 2021 Kickoff, our team resonated with the Hawaii Department of Agriculture's plea to create a Pet Pickup Notification System. As Hawaii is a rabies-free state, traveling with your pet to Hawaii can be a stressful and complicated process, to ensure that the state of Hawaii stays rabies-free. A pet owner must submit proper documentation and pay the appropriate fees and only after that may the pet owner retrieve their pet at the Animal Quarantine Center at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL). With the current COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses had to adapt to heightened restrictions and social distancing, as is true for Animal Quarantine Center. We hope to achieve a solution that will ensure that pet owners are notified when their pet is available for pickup to prevent unnecessary congregation at the Animal Quarantine Center, for safe and pawsome pickup.
What It Does
Our current solution was to create a website that would allow pet owners to track their pets using a tracking number. Upon checking in with the Animal Quarantine Center, a tracking code will be given to keep track of the pet. The pet owner can input their pet's tracking number onto the website to track their pet's status within the Animal Quarantine Center. When the pet is ready for pickup, the website will prompt the user to select a date and time to pick up their pet. Workers at the Animal Quarantine Center will be responsible for changing the status of the pet within the website.
How We Built It
We decided as a group that we would use Java as our programming language. To create the web application, we decided to use Spring Boot with Thymeleaf as a template engine and Spring JPA as a persistence framework. For avoiding boilerplate code, we are also using Lombok.
We used a Model, View, Controller (MVC) architecture, in which the business code is executed in Spring services and the data access works through Spring JPA Repositories (DAOs).
As far as team management and roles, we each kind of had a role in the team to play. Some of us took the lead on coding the application, while others worked on documentation. For communication, our team used Slack to ensure that everyone on the team has an idea of what others are working on. It was also our main place for discussion for the design of the project.
Challenges We Ran Into
By far, our biggest challenge was the timeframe in which we had to implement our solution. Many members of our team are not so familiar with web development, therefore this project is very much a learning experience for all of us.
Accomplishments That We're Proud Of
Our team is very proud to have been able to participate in this year's HACC. We were able to further put our knowledge from our software development class into practice, creating a somewhat functional proof of concept. We are proud of what we achieved with this limited timeframe but will love to improve our solution even more.
What We Learned
We have learned a lot more about the amount of time and effort that goes into developing a software project. We also learned more about the different languages and frameworks that were used in the making of this website. As previously said, most of us have little to no prior experience in web development so we learned a lot.
What's Next for SearchEngineBandits
Our team hopes to improve the current pet owner's experience when interacting with the site. The website's current look is very barebones, thus we hope to improve the overall visuals of the website to help pet owners easily track their pet's status. We would also like to introduce some other functionalities to the website.
Future Plans
- Allow the pet owner to receive text messages, emails, or both about their pet's quarantine status
- Provide the pet owner helpful information/links to the Hawaii Department of Agriculture's website for reference.
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