FoodQuest

FOODQUEST

Inspiration

During covid many small business and local restaurants were unable to keep their doors due to lack of business. we wanted to make a website that would help prompt people supporting the local restaurants as they are the backbone of our economy

What it does

Our website get nearby restaurants that serve take out and curbside pick up. This website was designed to support the community as we exclude chain restaurants, since many local business don't have enough capital to survive long periods of closure like the ongoing Covid19 Pandemic

How we built it

We built our website using the Google places api and a database of all local restaurants serving curbside pick up and take out. We get all nearby restaurants using the places api and then compare if the restaurant is the database. If the it is make a spot for it on the page with all of the data needed. If the restaurant is not in the database move on to the next one.

Challenges we ran into

We had a major challenge with having the api communicate with database. The javascript and php had no good method of send data back and forth as there is no form to submit. We had to only make request to pull data but not send any. We also have difficulties running the website online as without web hosting we can only run a static website, which would not contain our database. We could not pull time as unless the restaurant owner put the hours of operation it would work, but if they didn't the program would error and stop working not completing the rest of the list.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our ability to not only have multiple apis work in sync but then communicate with our database. We had difficulty with the request to the database so overcoming that with this being our first experience with apis was a very exciting moment.

What we learned

We learned how to properly integrate apis into our website as prior to this none of us have experience with apis and excluding our challenge with that database it went off falsely

What's next for Foodquest

FoodQuest next step is to have a user expanded database where user can send data to our database to expand what restaurants we recognize. This would work on a number of pings after a threshold it would add the restaurant to the database. Other improvements such as better communication to the database api would also be a step going forward and other miscellaneous improvements such as flitters for types of food.