Udacity FEND Neighbourhood Map Project - Restaurants App

By Sam Chung

Introduction

This is a simple, responsive web app that allows you to look up restaurants using the Google Maps JavaScript API. It also uses the Yelp Fusion API to provide additional details about the places you search for.

Front-End

The app uses Bootstrap for layout and styling, and uses knockout.js for two-way data binding.

Back-End

A node/express server serves the app and all required static files. There's also an internal api that serves the initial sample location data that gets loaded on startup, and is used to make calls to the Yelp Fusion API.

Getting Started

To get started, first install dependencies using npm:

> npm install

Next, run the app:

> npm start

Additional Notes

The searchbox functionality contains numerous bugs in which search results are not localized properly, autocomplete is not contained to food-related results, etc. These bugs will be fixed in future releases.
A sample list of locations is provided in data/sampleLocations.js. This is the array of locations that gets loaded on startup. The server provides these locations through an internal api call made by the client.
Calls to the Yelp Fusion API were implemented server-side in order to avoid CORS errors. Calls are first made by an internal api call to the server from the client. The server then makes the actual call to the Yelp Fusion API endpoint, retrieves the results, and then sends them back to the client.