Neighborhood Foodsharing

About

As part of the class “Applied Programming” in the summer semester 2021, we have developed a project that takes up the idea of food sharing. On the one hand, this served to deepen our programming knowledge, but on the other hand, it also served as a submission as an exam alternative.

The idea behind it

The idea is quite simple. There is a map on which all users can enter their food that they no longer need. Other users can then pick them up. For this purpose, we have a list view and a map view.

Users can create an account, add new groceries and also delete them. They can also change their data and log out again.

The technical implementation

In the class we learned the basics of NodeJS, Express and EJS, which we also used for the project. As a database we used MongoDB. In the class we worked with SQLite, which we tried for a short time, but then we switched to MongoDB, because we already had experience with it and it was easier for us.

During the development we added a framework for the map view (Mapbox) and Bootstrap for the design.

The live demo

The goal was actually to have our application running locally, on one computer, and to be able to demonstrate it during a video conference. Now we already have a robust database and a good website - so why not a live demo? Easy!

We already had experience with Docker, so we packaged our application as a docker image and deployed the whole thing to one of my servers. The live demo has been running on foodsharing.soeren-helms.de since then.

The presentation was very positive in that we were able to stand out from the other projects.

Conclusion

The project was a lot of fun and we learned a lot. It was a good change from the other projects we currently have in our studies. It was also good preparation for the project work in the next semester.

Screenshots