cippero / ameliorate

aMeliorate

(This app is in Progress)

Proposal

aMeliorate is an MVC progressive web app for those who want to optimize their lives. It lets users track daily personal statistics and visualize them over time to understand the effects of various influences on their wellbeing.

As a general example, notice that on Monday you had 6 cups of water and pasta for lunch and dinner which made you feel sluggish on Tuesday. Whereas on Thursday you exercised, had 12 cups of water and plenty of vegetables, and as a result felt great on Friday.

Description

I'm using Node.JS and Express as the Controller layer and GraphQL through Apollo to access and serve data. Rather than a traditional RESTful API, this setup optimizes dataflows by only interacting with the specific data that the client application is requesting, so that requests to the server are reduced and the application can scale better.

For the Model layer I'm using PostgreSQL with the Node.JS ORM Knex.JS in order to parameterize SQL queries and prevent SQL injections. The app will also be taking advantage of AWS Cognito for user authentication and authorization to prevent a user from accessing pages they’re not supposed to access, like editing another user’s profile. AWS Lambda will be utilized for running certain functions to reduce the request load on the Express server.

The View layer/frontend is built using React for component-based UI rendering since it's a lightweight, easily customizable library that only re-renders certain parts of the app if they've changed from the previously stored version (comparing the diff), Redux as the central state store, and Jest for unit testing. I'm aiming to build the project as a progressive web app which will allow it to be accessed both from the web and as a native app with offline capabilities.

I chose to develop the application in TypeScript in order to prevent runtime type errors that can happen with data interaction in dynamic languages like JavaScript where types are easily changed. I set up both frontend and backend in Docker to ensure consistency in terms of development environments so that any developer on any system can pick up the project and start developing with minimal setup and no dependency issues. I'm using CircleCI for continuous integration so that every change to the code will be tested whenever it's uploaded to GitHub.

Getting Started

Deployed version coming soon!

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To run the app locally (make sure to install Docker and Docker-Compose):

1. Clone and download the repo.
2. Navigate to the project folder.
3. run "npm install" and then "docker-compose up --build" in both frontend and backend subdirectories.
4. The app should be running on http://localhost:3000 and the server on http://localhost:8080.

Technologies and Tools

Node.js, TypeScript, React, Redux, Express, GraphQL, Apollo, PostgreSQL, Knex, Docker, CircleCI

Models

User Schema

ID	First Name	Last Name	Email	Join Date
Primary Key	String	String	String	Timestamp

Stats Schema

User_ID	Entry Date	Weight	Water Intake	Sleep Amount	Sleep Quality	Exercise Type	Exercise Length	Exercise Intensity	Overall Feeling
Foreign Key	Timestamp	Integer	Integer	Integer	Integer	String	Integer	Integer	Integer