Officer Meeting 2: November 7 2014

Things discussed for the app: App Engine & UI by Isaiah and Colin (Colin was absent), Data Scraping by Andrew and Lauren, Databases by Tyler & Eric, and Data Structures by Gianluca and Eero.

App Engine and UI

• We wanted to use Google Endpoints and Google App Engine, but Google App Engine is not what we had originally thought it to be. It does not convert code from Android to iOS, which is the main feature that we wanted.
• It was suggested that we use J2ObjC, which can convert code from Java to objective C, but it doesn't convert UI. So, we might have to end up developing the iOS code ourselves. A secondary option is App Furnace.

App Furnace

• You code it in C and App Furnace converts the code to Android and iOS.
• More info is needed.

App Layout

• One idea for navigation would be to have fragments across the top of the app that contain the content of the different categories, but that's more suited for full websites on the internet.
• Another idea would be to have a grid of tiles, similar to the iOS home screen.
• More layout options will be discussed in our next meeting when we make final decisions.

Apple License

• We do need an Apple license in order to post an app to the iOS store. It's $99/year for any year you want to publish or update an app, but if you want to keep apps that you've already published up and not publish any more, it's free.
• So, we should decide every year if Byte Club wants to purchase an Apple license to be able to code iOS during that year.

Data Scraping

• Chrome Developer Tools
• -xhr shows all of the places a website went to in order to retrieve data, so you can get the data from it.
• So, we could use this to get anything that would be hard to scrape (calendars, directories, etc.).
• Hopefully, we can turn the rest of the website into RSS Feeds so it would be easy to scrape it
• Beautiful Soup also is an option for web scraping. It's a Python library that allows you to input a website and it gives you a mess of tags (hence the name) that you can sort out with its built in methods to get whatever you want from the website.

Databases

• Databases are what you use when you have user data/news data to store.
• It's basically an excel sheet that you can use queries to get info from.
• You use keywords (which query the information) and the database will give you all of the resulting information that you requested.
• Google Cloud SQL/MySQL is an option, but Dr. Murray might have a database available for us to use as well.
• We also will need to secure any databases we use so that we can't be hacked with SQL injection.

Data Structures

• We don't need much more than the local data structures that objective C and Java have.
• We might use B+ Trees, which are a storage structure that make it easier to sort through large pools of data by ID number.
• We also will have usernames and passwords for users so that we will be able to get demographic information on our users and let them customize the app for their needs.
• We could also use Geo-Fencing to have the user be alerted when another user of the app is near.

Our next meeting will be on Friday the 14th.