Willow

UC Hackathon

Description

Do you ever forget about after-school events and activities? Do you consistently get frustrated with the lack of organization for your events?

Enter Willow: a program that connects all of your after-school activities in a central location.

This program gives you an overview of all of the after-school activities you have and when they occur. They allow clubs and their leaders to send messages and reminders to members. A calendar overview allows people to see what events they have in the future.

The life of a student is already stressed from an excess of activities and tests. This program would relieve some of the uncertainty in a student's everyday life.

The app is also streamlined from a data perspective. We utilized the Google Sheets API so that club data would be stored in easily changeable spreadsheets. Club leaders can also use Google Forms to input data, and we handle the processing.

Languages/Libraries/APIs

Java, JavaFX, Jfeonix, Google Sheets API

Challenges

We had a near infinite amount of challenges with our project. We all have really never used GitHub at the same time before, leading to a countless amount of merge errors and lost work. We also learned JavaFX, which took up the largest amount of our time. Writing complex GUIs caused tons of errors and wasted FXML files as we had to restart several times. We also realized that half of us were on Java 1-9, not Java 1-8, thus causing errors as methods didn't exist. This wasted more time as the download speeds were not optimal. Finally, the Google Sheets API was harder to implement than we anticipated. While guides did exist, these did not work and we had to write a few custom classes to interpret, read, and parse the data correctly.

Built With

• google
• google-spreadsheets
• java