Week 5 - FAMK - Backend API call page

👋 Welcome to CryptoWatch™! Here you can check the current value of the most popular cryptocurrencies in major world currencies. CryptoWatch™ is powered by:

We are:

Jamie 🌜
Pat 🐈
Judith 🐃
Gillian 🐧

💾 Installation Guide

Clone this repo
Run npm install in the command line
Run npm start to power up a local server
See site on localhost:3000 in your browser

This project uses an open API, so there is no need to setup an API key.

📐 Planning Process and Architecture

Once we'd decided on our project idea, we decided to draw a diagram of how information would flow through the different files:

The user enters data in the GUI (index.html)
the front-end script (main.js) makes a request to our back-end scripts (via handlers.js etc)
these make a request to the CoinGecko API
the response from CoinGecko is flowed back to the front-end
the front-end script updates the browser

We then made a big ol' to-do list for all the tasks

We also sketched a quick mockup of the page layout

🏁 On your marks, get set, go!

On Day 1:

We mobbed the initial set up of the project, including the HTML
Judith and Gillian started writing the server/router/handlers side of things...
...while Jamie and Pat set out on the beginnings of the front end scripting including TESTS!

On Day 2:

Judith and Pat got stuck into the front-end scripts, in particular the API call to the back end
Jamie and Gillian finished the back end parts and wrote some very super super tests
Judith and Pat ran into some weird problems with handling the API response and managing the formatting of the timestamp, which caused them some headaches
But they managed to get it all up and working, and added some stratospheric DOM manipulation
Jamie was the CSS master, with Pat later adding some expert upgrades
Jamie and Gillian worked on the bits and pieces to get the project deployed (Travis, Codecov, Heroku)... and got the all important badges!

⚡Visual Design

We decided that our design should be 'modern' to reflect the nature of cryptocurrencies, with a simple colour scheme

We chose a background image of a black and white image shown in binary 0s and 1s to give the idea of computers/cryptography.

🆗 Tests

Our current code coverage status:

The missing 5% is the lines of code which deal with handling server errors (status 500). As far as we know, it is not possible to test for these.

👓 Accessibility

😖 Problems

Typos!
Integrating Travis, Codecov, other testing modules.... lots of bits and pieces that were new for us and we didn't find the documentation super helpful for beginners
Some very strange JavaScript behaviour when handling the API request in the front end....

➡️ Future Improvements

Add autocomplete functionality when typing cryptocurrency (similar to last week's project)
Add ability to reverse conversion: e.g. from USD to Bitcoin

pat-cki / week5-famk-backend-api