Taste BU-DS

Inspiration

One of our team members has dietary restrictions and struggled to use the slow and unintuitive BU Dining website that also didn't provide all the features he desired. We built this web app to help students deal with dietary restrictions and allergies and find meals at the three main dining halls at once.

What it does

Prompts the user to input dietary restrictions and allergies. The program provides all available options based on those parameters based on information from the BU Dining website.

How we built it

We separated our team to work on the frontend and the backend. We used Playwright to scrape the BU Dining website since there was no standardized API to pull data from the web page. For the frontend, we used React to design the functionality of the website. Finally, we used flask as our micro framework to connect the website frontend and the backend.

Challenges we ran into

We tried using multiple different tools to scrape the BU Dining website but most of them couldn't work. Beautiful Soup couldn't work because the inner HTML was a much larger file than the live DOM, and had all the possible options which made it difficult to parse. So we switched to playwright so we could just parse what a user would actually see if they visited BU dining website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first experience participating in a hackathon for the entire team. We proud of the fact that we managed to build a finished project which works.

What's next for Taste BU-DS

Hopefully we can upgrade the project so that it could take in live data from the BU Dining webpage.

Built With

• flask
• playwright
• python
• react