kpie89 / drunken-critic-front-end

Front End for The Drunken Critic - Full Stack Project GA WDI Boston

The Drunken Critic

A web app made for beer lovers to rate beers they've had and discover new beers.

Using:

-Javascript -jQuery -HTML5 -CSS3 -Handlebars

Link to wireframes: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2d49olny23c8a6x/AAC48jYFy4u2k2ygibMMOSLQa?dl=0

Link to live-app: https://github.com/kpie89/drunken-critic-front-end

User Stories

• As a user, I will be able to sign-up, sign-in, change my password and log off easily.
• I will be able to search for existing beers in the database, read information about them and rate them.
• I will be able to view my ratings from the past and edit or delete them as I see fit.

Future User Stories

• I will be able to connect with others and see the ratings they have created.
• I will be able to add a beer on my own if it doesn't already exist in the database.

The Project

This project was a great introduction to using Ruby on Rails and to building my own back-end API. This project also continued to build my skills on the front-end. As an avid craft beer enthusiast, it seemed natural that my first big project be an amalgamation of two of my greatest passions. I felt much more comfortable writing code in JS and jQuery than I did on my last project and now I am very happy with the way the page is styled.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges this project presented was connecting the front-end AJAX requests with the back-end and, subsequently, the third party API. With so many requests firing all depending on user interaction, it was tough for me to separate my concerns in order to avoid requests getting in each other’s way. At first I found it difficult to use handlebars to best display the results of a beer search or to properly display the random beer generator on the screen. Eventually, I figured it out and found handlebars to be a very powerful tool when developing.

Future Plans

This project is far from done! I plan on making a way for users to connect with other users and view the beers they have rated. Also, I would like to make it possible to search my brewery and make my search parameters much more broad than they are now. In order to do this, I will be adding a “beer table” to my back-end and filling it with existing data from open brewery databases and allowing users to add beers when they are not present.