Inspiration
One of our group members had manually created a word cloud from a poem before in an art class, and though it would be cool to use programming to make one automatically.
What it does
Our project is a Java swing application which has a text input area for a user to write/paste some kind of text. It then sends a HTTP request to an API which generates a image for the word cloud and returns a URL for it. Then, we find the image at that URL and display it.
How we built it
Word Cloud Generator was built using Java with the UniRest library and the Word Cloud Generator API from rapidapi.
Challenges we ran into
We changed our project idea multiple times during the development process and restarted, which limited how much time we had. We had originally planned to code the image creation aspect of Word Cloud Generator but had switched to using an API when pressed on time which then required learning a whole lot of new skills.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
First time using an API with a programming project. First time making a complete application in a remote team project.
What we learned
We learned how to use Maven to manage libraries and dependencies. We learned how to use the Unirest library to send requests to a web API. We learned how to use regular expressions to filter and clean user input.
What's next for Word Cloud Generator
We wanted to allow the user to input an image/shape which the word cloud is shaped in, which would require the use of a different API or new functionality in our code. Also, we were hoping to create a website for our app while keeping it Java based for the backend.
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