We all had a common qualm about traveling abroad: while it was exciting to see new stuff at newer places at even more novel nations, we just found it hard to plan the trip and get around. Luckily for us, google maps and overpriced roaming helped us evade the fate of getting lost in the city.
HappyTravels is an application designed to simplify the traveling process. It utilizes Radar.io to find tourist locations (eg: a restaurant or a museum) near the user and Google Maps to bring up a path to a selected location. The locations can be filtered by category and preferences of the user to give them a result that may interest them. Once one of these locations is selected, a path is displayed. This design is effective since, without it, the user would have to constantly switch between a search engine and a map application to evaluate every potential location to visit.
We were set to make a webapp that relied on flask to generate a website that displayed our app's results. However, time wasn't on our side, and we ran out of time before we could link the webapp GUI to the backend. Our app is built with Google Maps APIs, Radar.io API and Flask, interconnected with a backend full of Python.
Some technical challenges we ran into were integrating the API to our program. In addition, there was a lot of debugging done due to some people not being familiar with the Python syntax. Challenges we ran into as a group include not enough clear communication and project plans constantly being updated. While our group had a lot of vision and ideas for how the project was to end up as, it was difficult to constantly integrate these ideas into our main project plan.
Most of us are newbie hackers, so having come up with this in a short time makes me very happy. All of our members also learned a ton of stuff, such as flask, basic html, JavaScript, and Using APIs in various contexts and languages. Also, our algorithm ran very well after a painstakingly long debug process, and we are super proud of it. Lastly, having been able to scrape the code together after an intense amount of time without sleep was a great experience. Teamwork makes the dreamwork!
We learned numerous different technologies we have not used before. Some of our group members got their first experience with API usage while others got experience with development with Python. In addition, we learned about Flask usage and how Python can be used for development of web applications.
The nearest goal for HappyTravels is to create a clean website application that will be easier for our users to interact with. It may expand into a mobile application as well as it is common for a traveler to bring their phone wherever they travel to. In the long term, we may look into utilizing machine learning and data from all our users to create a more effective location filter that can enhance user experience.
Happy travelling!