Inspiration
As college students branching off from our parents’ care and forming our own lives, we often have many things laying around that we thought we may use but end up never touching. These items lay there, collecting dust and begging to be put to use before they wither away or get thrown out. Wouldn’t it be great if these items actually end up used by someone, anyone, instead of wasted?
What it does
Tradem is a trading network that is adapted to each college campus. There is a trading board at the center of the website where you can add proposed trades for your peers. Each trade will take place at a predetermined campus location with plenty of public visibility so that everyone involved feels safe. When you make an account with your student email, you are automatically matched with the college campus you are attending. From there the portal is user friendly and has all the information you need to start getting rid of things you don’t need for things you want.
How we built it
On the frontend, ReactJs is our framework of choice for this project. On the backend, we use Flask to serve the app on top of an Azure Virtual Machine instance. For our database to hold user data and trades, we use Azure SQL. Authentication is done using the Azure AD B2C service. To future proof the project there is a load balancer that fronts the authentication and web server instance.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge we ran into was getting the database to communicate with the web app front end. We solved this by making a REST call to the backend from the frontend. The backend retrieves data from the database and forwards it on the response to the React app so that it can be displayed.
Accomplishments and What we Learned
We all learned a great deal from this project. React and Azure are industry standard products and versatile tools for any developer to have. Each one of us developed our skills in both of these technologies either by programming with them directly, interfacing with them, or interpreting their code. Aside from that our biggest accomplishment was designing and implementing a full stack web application that is useful and can be iterated with in the future.
What's next for Tradem
We believe this app is useful for college students. Students usually don’t have cash lying around, but they may have extra food, clothing, or other necessities in surplus that they can trade for something more valuable to them. We hope to solidify this application and put out a prototype for students at Texas A&M.
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