Inspiration
Parking is always a challenge at UT San Antonio. Learning the disaster that is parking on campus is something every commuter, housing, or employee pass holder must do to achieve punctuality, but it most definitely is a learning curve. This website helps new UTSA parkers get a good sense of what time they should arrive on campus or if they should plan to spend extra time parking - before it is all too apparent, all too late.
What it does
Webpage asks for you to fill in two dropdown menus about the lot you are interested in, and the time you expect to arrive. Then you push a button and it will show on the meter the expected parking availability at the entered lot and time.
How we built it
The html page dropdowns are made up of elements, and each element has a value matching a specific case in the java file. When the button is clicked, the js file runs feeds the dropdown values and builds a url with the values to send to the java file in the expected formatted response using fetch. The java file calculates the likelyhood of parking and sends it back in JSON to fetch. The js file then interprets the number by range and prints out the corresponding parking status and availability bar.
Challenges we ran into
The progress bar wouldn't show up but we ended up needing to add the script to the bottom of the html file which taught us about when the js file is read and how that works in correlation with html. Neither of us have used CSS or HTML since like middle school so relearning how to do that was interesting (shout out We3Schools). We also had never used javascript before and that was also a challenge, but necessary to connect the backend to front end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Me and Github are buddies now. Connecting a java file to a webpage is really cool for us, limit just got higher type beat.
What we learned
Learned about Github and having multiple collaborators for 1 project. We learned front end development. We learned about dropdown menus and buttons and progress bars. About connecting backend to front end. About javascript. About JSON and sending data from a webpage into a java file.
What's next for UTSAParkingAvailability
We want to have data backed parking recommendations and include more lots. We also would like to improve our webpage design and add the parameter of day-of-the-week. Instead of coding by type of parking, we'd like to have java read the specific parking code (TAG, XAG, BRG) and recognize patterns (ending in G- garage, prefix BR- brackenridge) and give data based off that.
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