Team X presents WhereTo.
A web app to find places around the world with similar climates.
WhereTo. is an experimental web app, created to compare different travel destinations by climate.
The user can search for similar destinations around the world, which are categorised using their Köppen climate classification. This can give them ideas for holiday destinations and maybe inspire some new places for them to visit within their comfort zone.
The idea initially arose from the observation that certain Italian towns had a very similar temperature to São Paulo and if you wanted that Brazilian weather, you wouldn't have to leave Europe. This rolled neatly into the concept for this app.
We use a database to store a large number of locations and some climate data about them. A ranking algorithm is used to return a diverse range of locations, all with similar climates.
WhereTo Demo Video | Northcoders Project Presentations
Team X
Joshua Banister
Elliot Robertson
Ben Weston
Oliver Jim
Chris H
Tech Stack
We picked technologies that were highly rated by developers. Svelte has 90% satisfaction in this year’s state of javascript and is ranked joint top. Sveltekit is new on this year’s survey and topped the chart for back-end frameworks at 96%. TypeScript is also highly rated and requested in a lot of job specifications so we wanted to use it in our project.
We chose MongoDB because it natively lets us search based on co-ordinate data.
FAQs
Q. How do you classify the countries?
A. We are using the Köppen climate classification system. It was created by Wladimir Köppen in 1884, and divides the world into 5 different climate groups – split into 28 sub-groups. With this system, we can show the user cities with a similar climate to their chosen destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification
Q. Why did you choose your tech stack?
A. We wanted to use technology that is highly rated by developers. Svelte and Sveltekit both ranked extremely highly in the State of JavaScript 2021 survey, and TypeScript is consistently one of the most loved languages in the Stack Overflow yearly developer survey. We chose MongoDB due to it’s ease of use, cloud features and it’s native geospatial data queries - which fit our location based app perfectly.
Q. What issues did you have during the project?
A. As we created our app using a lot of new technology, we had to learn as we went. This meant we found better ways to implement features as we progressed through the project development. For example, relatively late in the project we realized we could use page endpoints in Sveltekit to do our API requests behind the scenes, passing the return values as props to the component. Given more time, we would have implemented local storage to reduce the number of API calls needed, using Svelte stores to hold our location images and accessing them on multiple pages. The next steps in development would be adding the ability to save and share destinations, user profiles, and more information about each place such as the local currency and distance from the current location.
Q.How did you plan the app?
A. We created this app through using agile working practices. Before starting to code the app, we created a Trello board to plan the tasks