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Hack The Valley 4

Hack the Valley 2020 project

On The Radar

Inspiration

Have you ever been walking through your campus and wondered what’s happening around you, but too unmotivated to search through Facebook, the school’s website and where ever else people post about social gatherings and just want to see what’s around? Ever see an event online and think this looks like a lot of fun, just to realize that the event has already ended, or is on a different day? Do you usually find yourself looking for nearby events in your neighborhood while you’re bored? Looking for a better app that could give you notifications, and have all the events in one and accessible place? These are some of the questions that inspired us to build “On the Radar” --- a user-friendly map navigation system that allows users to discover cool, real-time events that suit their interests and passion in the nearby area.

Now you’ll be flying over the Radar!

Purpose

On the Radar is a mobile application that allows users to match users with nearby events that suit their preferences.

The user’s location is detected using the “standard autocomplete search” that tracks your current location. Then, the app will display a customized set of events that are currently in progress in the user’s area which is catered to each user.

Challenges

Lack of RAM in some computers, see Android Studio (This made some of our tests and emulations slow as it is a very resource-intensive program. We resolved this by having one of our team members run a massive virtual machine)
Google Cloud (Implementing google maps integration and google app engine to host the rest API both proved more complicated than originally imagined.)
Android Studio (As it was the first time for the majority of us using Android Studio and app development in general, it was quite the learning curve for all of us to help contribute to the app.)
Domain.com (Linking our domain.com name, flyingovertheradar.space, to our github pages was a little bit more tricky than anticipated, needing a particular use of CNAME dns setup.)
Radar.io (As it was our first time using Radar.io, and the first time implementing its sdk, it took a lot of trouble shooting to get it to work as desired.)
Mongo DB (We decided to use Mongo DB Atlas to host our backend database needs, which took a while to get configured properly.)
JSON objects/files (These proved to be the bain of our existence and took many hours to get them to convert into a usable format.)
Rest API (Getting the rest API to respond correctly to our http requests was quite frustrating, we had to use many different http Java libraries before we found one that worked with our project.)
Java/xml (As some of our members had no prior experience with both Java and xml, development proved even more difficult than originally anticipated.)
Merge Conflicts (Ah, good old merge conflicts, a lot of fun trying to figure out what code you want to keep, delete or merge at 3am)
Sleep deprivation (Over all our team of four got collectively 24 hours of sleep over this 36 hour hackathon.)

Process of Building

For the front-end, we used Android Studio to develop the user interface of the app and its interactivity. This included a login page, a registration page and our home page in which has a map and events nearby you.
MongoDB Atlas was used for back-end, we used it to store the users’ login and personal information along with events and their details.
This link provides you with the Github repository of “On the Radar.” https://github.com/maxerenberg/hackthevalley4/tree/master/app/src/main/java/com/hackthevalley4/hackthevalleyiv/controller
We also designed a prototype using Figma to plan out how the app could potentially look like. The prototype’s link → https://www.figma.com/proto/iKQ5ypH54mBKbhpLZDSzPX/On-The-Radar?node-id=13%3A0&scaling=scale-down
We also used a framework called Bootstrap to make our website. In this project, our team uploaded the website files through Github. The website’s code → https://github.com/arianneghislainerull/arianneghislainerull.github.io The website’s link → https://flyingovertheradar.space/#

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