Crave is a web application that uses Yelp's Fusion API to help users pick a restaurant or experience. The app obtains user location via HTML5 Geolocation and plots merchants on a map based on search terms and search rules.
- Deployed web application
- Uses Yelp's Fusion API
- Plot merchants on a map
- Obtain user location via HTML5 Geolocation
- Users can refine a search by different parameters (open now, best match, rating, etc.)
- Users recieve information about the distance in miles and time to reach a business
- Users can request more businesses
- Users can select an item from the list to view its location on the map and the route to get there
- Users can view the Yelp page for a merchant by clicking on the title of the business from the list or a map marker
- The Yelp API has daily access limiting as well as queries-per-second limiting. In some circumstances, these limits may lead to HTTP 429 errors, resulting in loss of core functionality.
- HTML/CSS/JavaScript
- Bootstrap
- JQuery/Axios
- Yelp's Fusion API
- Google Maps Platform
Before working on this project, I had never wrote a single line of HTML or CSS and I had very little experience in Javascript. I had originally planned on building my first website over the summer, but now time was no longer a luxury. I found the challenge to be overwhelming - I had never done anything close to building a website, and had no clue where to even begin. After going through the requirements and spending days trying to learn a framework such as React and Vue.js, I made little to no progress and considered not pursuing the challenge.
I decided to go back to basics with vanilla Javascript. As soon as I did this, I started making measurable progress. Although JS frameworks/libraries can be extremely powerful and help clean up code, I found that they abstracted away a lot of code, which made it difficult for me to understand what was happening behind the scenes. This is why I used vanilla Javascript with JQuery and Axios for modifying HTML and making API requests respectively.
This challenge was an amazing opportunity that made me really push myself to see what I could accomplish with a fundamental understanding of CS in a two week time frame. I have learned so much from working with these different languages, and I still have a long way to go as a developer. Overall this challenge was very fun and I enjoyed working on this project - thank you!
Hello, my name is Nicholas Lin and I am a first-year computer science study in the School of Engineering at UVA. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, feel free to email me at nicholaslin@email.virginia.edu.