NYS Fair Events Mobile Application With Client-Side Caching

Abstract

NYS Fair Events collects data about fair events which happen in New York state throughout the year, bundles them, displays the upcoming events and useful information about the event itself, the weather and forecast prediction, and a Google Maps to show the route to the event from the user’s location.

The motivation for creating this project arose with understanding the growing market for mobile applications and by working for a startup for several months now in the field of web development. A trend has been established in which more users are switching towards mobile apps as their preferred information exchange tool than their traditional PCs and hence the development of better apps should be geared towards mobile phones and tablet PCs.

The development of the app is mainly divided into two steps, the client and server side. For the client side I developed a Cordova-based mobile app which is cross-platform and can be compiled to work on Android and IOS based mobile devices. For the server side, I used Node.js runtime environment and deployed it onto Heroku’s free dyno tier which is a cloudbased Platform as a service (paaS). Based on user’s actions, data is requested from the server’s endpoints and appropriate information is served and shown to the user in an intuitive manner.