The inspiration behind this project was the fact that tracking one's spending is something that is relatable to us college students on a personal level.
This application allows its users to keep track of the various subscription services in order to prevent the accumulation of unnecessary spending on services that may not even be actively used.
This web application was built with ReactJs as the client-side, utilizing the Bootstrap framework to create an account login and authentication system via Firebase Authentication. This project consists of a Firebase Realtime Database as the server-side meant to manage the several subscription services that users may be tracking.
The first challenge experienced during the development of this project was not being granted access to the API that was essential to truly make this functional in the intended way. In fact, even if we did receive access to this API we would require access to several others in order to bring our original idea to complete fruition. Instead, we chose to take a different approach by using our own fabricated data in order to capture what the fully functioning application would do. The most challenging obstacle we encountered was merging the client-side aspect of this application with its server-side. For instance, we had doubts regarding which language to use as the server-side as each of the options had their own advantages and disadvantages that we had to take into account. Settling on one option merely led to finding more of its difficulties and to alternating and ultimately reminded us to prioritize other aspects as this was a challenge we realized we could not overcome in the time remaining.
The design of the client-side aspect of this application is something that we are proud of as well as the fact that we were able to learn and familiarize ourselves with very new topics such as databases, which even involved using one that is cloud-based.
This collaborative project involved learning more about client-side and server-side than we are originally experienced with from the teammates that are indeed familiar with those topics. We exposed ourselves and challenged ourselves to new topics that we weren't necessarily confident in but ultimately we were able to form ideas that we can work on developing further.
SubAlert will go on to have fully functioning capabilities and will have properly interconnected client-side and server-side aspects. In addition, it will be able to notify and alert users whenever spending after inactivity goes beyond certain amounts through text messages.
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