https://secret-scrubland-79329.herokuapp.com/
The Take Me Home App was created in an effort to connect animals in rescues and shelters with potential new forever homes. After researching the applications that are currently available, a recurring theme became painfully clear. There are no pet adoption apps on the market that provide a clean, seamless interface. By creating 'Take Me Home', we hope that we can help all homeless pets find a life long love connection with their humans.
We approached creating this app with the MVP in mind. We utilized a MOSCOW strategy for develpment.
Mo - Must Have: What does this app absolutely HAVE TO HAVE in order to function properly?
This is also known as the MVP.
S - Should Have: This functionality is what the app should have, based on what a user
expects to see in a pet adoption app. This is based on the products that have already
paved the way in the market space. Users have seen certain features on similar apps,
so this is their "norm".
Co - Could Have: These are the "bells and whistles" features that could be added to increase
the WOW factor of our app. These will only be implemented after the Must Haves and Should Haves
are fleshed out, and solidly working.
W - Won't Have: Generally, these are the ideas akin to "Let's create an app that's a mash up
of Facebook and.. all of Google... and let's do it in a couple of days!" In other words,
these are features that are placed in the Ice Box.
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JavaScript - JavaScript is the programming language of HTML and the Web.
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jQuery - jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers. With a combination of versatility and extensibility, jQuery has changed the way that millions of people write JavaScript.
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$.ajax - AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In a nutshell, it is the use of the XMLHttpRequest object to communicate with server-side scripts. It can send as well as receive information in a variety of formats, including JSON, XML, HTML, and even text files.
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JSON - JSON is an open-standard format that uses human-readable text to transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs.
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Node.js - Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript Engine. As an asynchronous event driven JavaScript runtime, Node is designed to build scalable network applications. Documentation and Downloads for Node.js are availble on the Node.js website - https://nodejs.org/en/
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npm - npm is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js.
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Express - Express is a fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for node.
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EJS - EJS is a client-side templating language.
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HTML - HTML is a markup language for describing web documents (web pages). HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. A markup language is a set of markup tags. HTML documents are described by HTML tags. Each HTML tag describes different document content.
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CSS - Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language.
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MongoDB - MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented database. Classified as a NoSQL database, MongoDB avoids the traditional table-based relational database structure in favor of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and is published as free and open-source software under a combination of the GNU Affero General Public License and the Apache License. As of July 2015, MongoDB is the fourth most popular type of database management system, and the most popular for document stores.
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mLab - mLab is a fully managed cloud database service for MongoDB.
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Mongoose - Mongoose is a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment.
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Passport - Passport is authentication middleware for Node.js. Extremely flexible and modular, Passport can be unobtrusively dropped in to any Express-based web application. A comprehensive set of strategies support authentication using a username and password, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Documentation for passport can be found at - http://passportjs.org/docs
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Passport-Local - This module lets you authenticate using a username and password in your Node.js applications. By plugging into Passport, local authentication can be easily and unobtrusively integrated into any application or framework that supports Connect-style middleware, including Express.
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Heroku - Heroku is a cloud platform that lets companies build, deliver, monitor and scale apps — we're the fastest way to go from idea to URL, bypassing all those infrastructure headaches.
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Git and GitHub - As Git is a distributed version control system, it can be used as a server out of the box. Dedicated Git server software helps, amongst other features, to add access control, display the contents of a Git repository via the web, and help managing multiple repositories.
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Lucidchart - Lucidchart is the online diagramming application that we utilized when creating our User Flows and our Wire Frames.
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node.js - This was the backbone for our application, allowing for our use of npm dependencies. node.js may be downloaded at - https://nodejs.org/en/
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Express and EJS - We relied on Express to provide the framework for our app and EJS for the our views template.
For documentaion on Express, visit their site at: http://expressjs.com/
$ npm install express --save
For documentation on EJS, visit - http://ejs.co/
$ npm install ejs
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MongoDB, mLab and Mongoose - We utilized Mongoose to create our User and Likes Schemas,
stored in our MongoDB. Our User Schema was utilized not only for Authentication purposes, but also, to link users to their liked pets, via a melding of data from the User Schema and our petFinder API.Please note that you will need to create an account with MongoDB in order to utilize their services - https://www.mongodb.com/
For our specific purposes, we chose mLab to host our MongoDB. You can find sign up for an account and view their Quick-Start guide at - http://docs.mlab.com/
If you have not already done so, you will need to initialize your project before installing the mongodb package
$npm init npm install mongodb --save
For documentation on Mongoose, please visit - http://mongoosejs.com/
$ npm install mongoose
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Passport and Passport-Local - We utilized these dependencies in order to create our user authentication strategy.
For documentation on the passport package, visit - https://www.npmjs.com/package/passport
$ npm install passport
For documentation on passport-local package, visit - https://www.npmjs.com/package/passport-local
$ npm install passport-local
This program utilizes our internal APIs, developed by Team CatDog, as well as the Petfinder API.
The Petfinder API gives developers access to access Petfinder's database of over 300,000 adoptable pets and 11,000 animal welfare organizations (AWO). In addition to searching for adoptable pets on the Petfinder.com web site, you can use the API to create your own dynamic pet web sites or applications, using the same data we use on Petfinder.com.
As a team, one of our challenges, out of the gate was with our the first API we attempted to utilize. Lack of documentation and explanation of requirements created a major hurdle, when we attempted to utilize the API. Luckily, we found the petfinder API, which has much better documentation. While the petfinder API proved to be a better solution for our app, we did encounter a challenge with the image data. Given that the petfinder API collects data from a database of over 300,000 pets and 11,000 animal welfare organizations, there was no set standard for image quality. We encountered documents containing images of varying resolution and size, which made our goal of providing a clean visual experience, a bit of a challenge. When all was said and done, we found that certain image positions in the array of objects returned, were of higher quality than others, but there was no real consistency to speak of.
Another major hurdle was learning how to navigate the team's code. Throughout the development cycle of our app, it became very apparent how important readable code is. This proved to be a valuable learning experience, early on. Luckily, our team wrote relatively clean code, minimizing our potential issues.
Where do we go from here, you might ask? Well, for starters... we'd like to include a way for users to donate to animals that they would like to help, but can't adopt. The donate feature would allow users to contribute a certain amount that would be sent to the "hosting" shelter or rescue group. This contribution will pay for the animal's needs, while they're in their temporary home, such as food, medical needs or even toys (Hey, it's about the creature comforts too!).
We'd also like to implement a volunteer feature, where users are able to sign up and help out at shelters and rescue groups in need of some extra hands. This feature would include a calendar, where Administrators of Rescues and Shelters could post times/days they need help and volunteers could click and sign up for a shift on the designated days/times.
Marketing, Marketing, Marketing! We'd like to provide an even better experience for our users, so that we can facilitate animals finding loving homes! NO PET LEFT BEHIND!