DateThe6ix

Rosalyn Wong posted an update — Aug 27, 2017 09:29 AM EDT

The story behind DateThe6ix is that we wanted an mobile app where users could look through events happening on days they were free, and plan out their day, which includes what events they're interested in attending and different restaurants they want to attend.

How it works: Ideally, users would be able to log in with Facebook, and browse events and restaurants in their area. If they were interested in an event or restaurant, they would swipe right to shortlist those events, otherwise they would swipe left. Because the app is connected to Facebook, the user would be able to see events that their friends were interested in, and message them if they also swiped right on the event. Before the event, the app would send a reminder notification.

How it works: The events are pulled from Facebook using Facebook API. Our backend Java code is able to take in a query for what the user is interested in and search for related events. The restaurant data is pulled from Yelp using the Yelp API. The front end of the app is created using a platform called "Outsystems" which is used for creating the UI of Android apps. We were able to run the backend code to collect data and fill the database in Outsystems, however due to time restrictions we were unable to connect the backend to the front end to be executed at run time. The data in the database in Outsystems is from a previously run of our backend code. We also did not have enough time to limit the events to events only near the user. In the future we would want to implement functions to further parse the JSON response of the Facebook API and get the location data.

Challenges: None of us were familiar with Java so learning Java to implement the backend and fire HTTP requests was a challenge. We were also trying to execute our Java code in the terminal which involved the setting of environment variables which created some issues. For the front end, we realized that the platform was not very flexible and it was difficult to create a nice UI with standard CSS. Integrating the UI with code was also a complicated process.

We are proud of: We really like our idea and the swiping interface that we managed to create. We're also proud of being able to use APIs and store data in an excel file using our Java backend. For some members it was also the first time doing HTTP requests in the powershell successfully.

What we learned: Using Yelp, Facebook API, Java, Outsystems, Android Studio is more flexible that Outsystems

What's next: Orbis Challenge

Built with: Facebook API, Yelp API, Outsystems, Java

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krystaly2 started this project — Aug 26, 2017 12:02 PM EDT

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