Project Background
I selected the Sunrise-Sunset API because I felt that using an API that deals with time would be a good learning experience and relatively simple. I would be able to bootstrap an earlier project in the class that would eliminate a lot of recreating the wheel in terms of building JavaScript from scratch to get my data displayed.
Challenges
Getting the Vue.js web app to display the data proved difficult at first until I discovered that the listed parameters were incorrectly labeled in the documentation. Longitude was titled Long in the documentation, but is actually lng for example when a developer uses Inspect in their Devtools on Chrome. The API documentation also had no mention of the data being in Coordinated Universal Time UTC, which was something that I had never seen or heard of before.
- Errors in API Documenation
- Crucial Information omitted from API Documentation
Requirements
The goal for this project was to build a single page application using a JavaScript application framework. Our class used Vue.js as our JavaScript framework during the program. The requirements are listed below:
- A single comprehensive document containing a well-considered project plan consisting of a wirefram, Information Architecture, and other project plans.
- Utilize a JavasScript framework to build a single page app that allows user input
- Provide a useable experience across all modern web browsers and users who require assistive technologies
- Implement one feature designed to enhance the user experience
- Deploy project to a publicly accessible server
Research
I looked over a list of free to use third-party APIs that were made available to all classmates and choose one that I could start by bootstrapping from an earlier project and a subject that interested me. My research consisted mostly of starting off with the API documentation in addition to having to research the concept of UTC to both understand what it is and how to convert the data into the users local time.
Outcomes
In summary, what I built was an online webapp that a user can use to enter in longitude and latitude coordinates to return the following: sunrise, sunset, and various other times relevant to the sun's cycle for that day.
- Bootstraped a previous class project in the quarter using JavaScript code that I had already created easily displaying the data
- Worked with class instructor to implement the correct JavaScript code to convert UTC into local time
Technologies Used
