Link to web App. Please note: It will take sometime for a dyno to start up. When a url is not accessed for a long time, heroku automatically puts the app into sleeping mode. However, after starting up, the app runs properly.
Before the pandemic, we really enjoyed working out in our college gym. In early March Trinity College Dublin was closed for students and the education continued online. Moreover, all the sports facilities were closed. Since we could not meet in person in the gym to motivate each other, we decided that we should create a tool for sharing our workouts. Now that some of us left Ireland to go back to their home countries, because of COVID-19, we understood that participating in "Teens against Covid-19" is a perfect opportunity to showcase our skills and at the same time support each other in such uncertain times. Furthermore, we have conducted a survey among our classmates to find out whether they experienced problems similar to what we faced. Those students who used to exercise in the gym or take part in sports clubs have claimed that they have lost motivation to work out because they do not feel the healthy competition with their mates, relatives, and neighbors, which they used to experience almost every day before the virus spread. Our project aims to help people stay healthy and fit during the quarantine, which is a very important goal, as our mental health is directly dependent on our physical health.
What it does link
The idea of our project is to keep yourself and your friends motivated by posting what exercises you have done. The user has an opportunity to add more than 15 types of exercises to their profile. They can create groups to share their accomplishments as well as join the already existing groups. In addition, users can see the comparison between their performance and the performance of the other group members. Finally, the app can be accessed both by PC/laptop and smartphone, which makes it easy to use link.
We used various technologies in the production of our project such as the Vaadin framework, Spring framework, MongoDB, Heroku Cloud. The main programming language for that was Java and we also used a bit of CSS to style our Vaadin UI components. We started developing our project on the 18th of May and finished on the 25th. There were 7 students on our team: 6 developers and 1 manager.
The main challenge was learning a lot of new technologies. During our first year in college, we learned the basics of OOP in Java, so encountering the real frameworks was not that easy for us. However, we have managed to overcome all the difficulties in development by setting the specific team roles (backend, frontend) and by spending most of our free time on acquiring new knowledge. Furthermore, there were 6 developers on our team, so we needed to manage the code we wrote. We used the GitHub repository link for this as well as we had daily team meetings.
The most important accomplishment for us is applying what we learned in college to solve a real-world problem. The software we created has a full potential to benefit our community and we are proud to present it here. In addition, we managed to learn a lot of new things in a short period of time. Finally, this is our first hackathon together and we are very happy about how we organized our team.
We learned a Java web framework called Vaadin. Moreover, we had to learn Spring Security and Spring Data and integrate them with a Vaadin application. We used MongoDB to store information about users, which was a problem at first since we were all used to SQL databases. Finally, we deployed our application using Heroku cloud platform. We found out what continuous integration really means.
We are planning to create a full-fledged social network out of the prototype application we developed. We are going to add messages, posts, and friend lists. Another important step is to find support from people and governments from all over the world so that our project and can help people fight the pandemic. Finally, we intend to add more comparison features to our project as well as refactor our code. We think that this web app will help to get people motivated to exercise and stay healthy during the pandemic and after it ends