Global Food Loss Awareness — Data-Driven Web Application
The first thing I built with a database behind it.
A full-stack web application about global food loss, built to present the data and let a reader draw their own conclusion rather than argue a case at them. A plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript front end over a Java back end on Javalin, talking to SQLite through JDBC.
How it’s put together
Built with
- PERIOD
- Programming Studio 1 · 2024
- ROLE
- Pair programming — shared implementation
The hard parts
05 NOTESThe back end is Java on Javalin with JDBC to a SQLite database — a real server and a real query layer rather than a page with the numbers typed into it.
The front end is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, written before any framework was on the syllabus, which is the reason the later React work has something to compare against.
The subject is a social one, and the brief was to present the data without editorialising — so the design problem was making a genuinely unpleasant dataset readable without deciding for the reader what to feel about it.
Taken to real users for usability testing and then changed on what they said, rather than being demonstrated once and marked. Several of the changes were to things we had been certain about.
Built as a pair, coordinated over MS Teams with GitHub for version control — the first project where merging someone else’s work was a thing I had to be good at.
Want the parts that aren’t on this page — the architecture arguments, the things that broke, a live walkthrough?