This is the app we made! Basically we finished it in two days which is a huge improvement from our previous rock paper scissors app. It's called ATX Hot Spots, and is a Yelp like app but you find restaurants on the map. We downloaded a database of all the restaurants in Austin and their addresses and converted that data into tables we could work with in PostgreSQL. We had three tables, placelist (<--), reviews, and users. You can sign up and sign in. If you sign up with an email address that is linked to Gravatar, your picture is automatically referenced and pops up (so you don't have to manually upload one!). Each user's data (username, password, and email) is saved into the database with the password encrypted for security. Once you sign in, a session ID is created and also saved into that database so that you don't have to log in every time you refresh the page. We used a map API (Open Street Map) and leaflet.js to drop the pins at the restaurants. We started out with data from all restaurants in Austin (19,000 rows in the DB) because we downloaded the info from health inspections. To get rid of duplicates (multiple inspections at the same restaurant), we simply combined psql and ruby code to iterate through and delete extra data with the same facility ID. We used the latitude and longitude coordinates of the places so that we could use it to drop the pins. You can click through the slideshow above to see how it works. Once you click on a pin, the restaurant name and a link to their reviews show up. That link will take you to all of the reviews of that restaurant in addition to showing how many stars each person gave. In the right hand form, you can write and rate a restaurant and it'll show up in the reviews!
Today we just finished our mock hackathon and presented our projects. We actually got everything to work on our project which was the most satisfying thing ever. Today we started brainstorming for our real hackathon that starts tomorrow. We have two days to get another app up and running! Our idea now is to make a map based app that functions like Yelp but our main focus is a visual of the city of Austin. We're debating if we should use the Open Street Map API or the Google Maps API. We also want to use the Facebook API for logins but implementing this might be the most difficult part of the project so we'll see. Some documentation that we're going to use to make this happen:
Open Street Map Doc Facebook SDK for Javascript Google Maps API Doc Facebook Login API |