Inspiration
As several of our group members are children of immigrants, we wanted to create a tool that would ease the transition to a new country (specifically the United States) in some way. While a lot of the information is available via the web, it is often very hard for individuals who grew up in the United States to know exactly what to look for. Our aim is to simplify the acquisition and presentation of commonly needed information, such as housing, banking, and taxes for these individuals.
What it does
Our application is designed so that users can save their answers and the resulting information so that they can quickly retrieve their information without having to re-enter their information each time.
Upon login, the users are presented with a series of options (each of which is a somewhat broad category, such as banking or taxes). When they first choose each of the options they are presented with a series of yes-no questions about some of the more important (or what we feel are the more important at the moment) pieces of information of the category. These answers are stored in a SQL database, hosted on mySQL, and will be used to determine what pieces of information will be shown to the user after the survey is complete. The final page that will be shown will also ideally be stored so that the page does not need to be recomputed unless the user changes their answers to the survey.
How we built it
We built the front-end framework using javaFx, and a lot of the back-end programming using SQL and mySQL. Upon completion of the survey, the parsed user information is inserted into the table, where each row represents a distinct user and the columns represent each of the questions. As of now our intention is to group the users based on their answers to a subset of each survey questions and all members of the groupings will be shown the same page. Further improvements to the project involve taioring the information more to each participant but given the short time frame of the project, we felt that tailoring by groups is more prudent.
Challenges we ran into
None of us had much experience with front-end development, and we did not have much overlap in terms of programming languages, so we had to find a sort of middle ground, which is how we decided on JavaFx and SQL, which are both pretty well documented and somewhat easy to learn quickly.
While we did have some financial literacy, it was somewhat hard to parse the information that we were able to find into a meaningful format for others, especially those who could have limited knowledge of the English Language or a good background in finance.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Learning a lot more about JavaFx, SQL, and how to integrate the two.
What we learned
Learning JavaFx and SQL quickly. Additionally, the amount of information out there is pretty broad, so sifting through it to find relevant and useful information can be pretty hard.
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