A react-based recipe app that doesn't suck.
We wanted a way to eat healthier and reduce waste by cooking at home with the ingredients already in the kitchen. We decided to use APIs to find recipes that match the ingredients entered by the user. Detailed nutrition information is displayed for every recipe to ensure you can choose the healthiest foods that give you the nutritious value you need.
Basil asks the user to input common food ingredients, and matches them to a list of ingredients from an API. Next, various cooking websites are searched for recipes that use the ingredients selected by the user. The user can compare recipes in terms of quantity produced, and nutrition facts, as well as how healthy they are according to an algorithm.
We built a web app using Javascript, React, and Firebase. Web apps allow users to access our service from any device, and are easy to expand on in the future.
There were difficulties with using the APIs to find ingredients and recipes. The team was also new to React, so there was a steep learning curve to learning how to develop with it.
Overall, we are proud of the experience we gained developing in React. Learning a new programming language can be difficult, but we each brought our own strengths to the table and produced a quality product in a language we had little previous experience in.
We learned how to develop web apps using modern development frameworks, namely React. This kind of programming is quite different than other development environments such as Android Studio. The team expects the knowledge we gained to be valuable for future projects, hackathons, and careers.
We would like to add more options for customizing the way recipes are searched for. Specifically, the ability to identify substitute ingredients to recipes found online would allow Basil to recommend more recipes to the user.