Moling

Fall Semester

In this semester, I've been mainly working on the technical part of our project including the research phase and actual coding. I've also contributed to the data collection and general discussion.

After we decided to create a web experience related to food truck, I started to think of how to implement it. There are five main aspects I've been researched so far: front-end, APIs, back-end, map, social media. (See technical pages on wiki)

For front-end frameworks, since I worked on EmberJS for my last co-op, my initial intension is to build this project based on EmberJS. I tried to create an EmberJS prototype to fetch the food truck data from the third-party API, but I was stuck in halfway and can't figure it out, I realized that the MVC model of EmberJS is more suitable for a comprehensive back-end and a more full-structured web app, and it's changing so fast, the documentation is much different from when I read them during my co-op. However, our project don't need much interactions with back-end and in our current plan, it only talk to the data through the "GET" method. Then I turned to AngularJS since it's simple to get started and have a larger community so I could find solutions more easily.

I had some experience with back-end and Ruby on Rails before and I want to learn more about them from this project. Currently the database prototype are built on MySQL, connected through PHP, and fetched by AngularJS. There are still many back-end options need further research and it will be fully set up in next semester.

I also had a little experience with Mapbox before and it has good documentation so I want to learn more about it through this opportunity. During the data collection period, I also collected the major food truck location data with longitude and latitude from the Google Map and manually imported them to Mapbox for static display. I will try to make the data dynamically by using GeoJSON next semester.

After we have wireframes and design comps, I made the static site based on them. It is purely done by static HTML, CSS/SASS and JavaScript base on Bootstrap so far and will be integrated with all those frameworks components in the future.

For next semester I will continually work on technical part and the major challenge is to make the static site dynamic.

Spring Semester

This semester, my contributions include the app development, QA & Debugging, user testing, data collection, and RISE.

####Development In January and February, I spent most time working on the development of our project. Details can be found on Development Section.

• Created custom MySQL database including setting up database structure, drawing UML diagram and building tables and fields.
• Built back-end code with PHP to query data from database and process to be JSON file.
• Connected AngularJS with backend by making HTTP requests and receive the JSON response.
• Added dynamic contents to our app
• Implemented the interactive map finder
• Integrated all social media feeds
• Implemented the truck list and searchbox
• Added truck animations on splash page and truck page
• General CSS Styling
• Optimized the app to fit for different screen size
• Refinement and Bug fixes.

####Data Collection

• Collected truck data to spreadsheets
• Went through the menu of each truck and added them to database
• Went through the schedule of each truck from API, City of Boston Website, and their websites/social media

####Others

• Did user testing on 5 users and collected feedback
• Worked with team to prepare for the RISE
• Hosted the app and bought the domain