The idea behind the recipe web application formed when the benefits of being a student were ending. Cooking at home became the next cheapest alternative, but the wish for socializing with friends during meals remained. The result was an idea for a web application that would present recipes in simple manner and at the same time enable users to share and like recipes as well as integrate a system of invites between friends.
The application is created with the help of a PHP framework Laravel, which enables writing meaningful and beautiful code. Beside the framework, it uses a JavaScript library ReactJS, which produces faster and more responsive website and consequently a better user experience. The whole development was based on tools, which allow easier, faster and most importantly more coherent development of software code.
The development, even with using the appropriate tools, did not go without some problems. The biggest problem arose while using a third party service for managing transactional emails. After only one month of using Mandrill as my primary service for distributing registration, password reset and friend invites emails, Mailchimp (the owner of Mandrill service) decided to suspend Mandrill as an independent product and integrated it as a part of paid service package inside Mailchimp [1]. Because the code for defining a third party service like sending emails is written well in Laravel, the hassle of changing from one service provider to the other was easy.
Next chapters describe different technology used, their use in the production and a tutorial for using the web application.
The finished result is a web application that hosts recipes where users can share and like them. Users can also tag their friends and invite them to cook together.
The website is not live yet so it has not endured a full user experience and stress test. With the help of analysis tools and tools for measuring metrics it is going to become obvious what is missing with the current state of the application and where it can grow.
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