week 9

 

In Week 9 of the FoodNextDoor project, our team finalized and consolidated the complete technology stack for the application, ensuring that each component is aligned with our performance goals, user needs, and long-term scalability. The finalized stack is built around the MERN stack—MongoDB, Express.js, ReactJS, and Node.js—which offers a full JavaScript-based development environment, streamlining both frontend and backend development. ReactJS is used to develop a dynamic, component-based frontend that ensures a responsive user experience, particularly useful for rendering the multi-page survey and search functions. To support styling, we integrated Tailwind CSS, which helped us build responsive and clean interfaces with minimal custom CSS. On the backend, Node.js serves as the runtime environment, with Express.js managing our server-side routing and API structure. This lightweight and efficient combination has allowed us to build and test RESTful APIs for user registration, login, survey data submission, and staff search functionality. MongoDB was selected for its flexibility in storing unstructured survey responses, and we used Mongoose to define schemas and manage data interactions smoothly. We also adopted JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for secure user authentication and session handling, ensuring that personal data is protected during all stages of use. For hosting, we plan to deploy the frontend on Vercel and the backend API on Render, which simplifies continuous deployment and allows us to scale services independently. In addition, GitHub continues to be our central tool for version control, enabling collaboration across team members with pull requests and branch management. For UI/UX design, Figma remains our primary wireframing and prototyping tool, supporting collaborative feedback and interface refinement. We also explored and added Postman to our toolkit for efficient API testing and debugging. By finalizing this technology stack, we’ve ensured that our project is built on proven, scalable, and developer-friendly technologies that can support future enhancements beyond the MVP. The stack also supports rapid development cycles, ideal for the agile methodology we’ve adopted throughout our sprints. With the stack now fully in place and all integrations tested, our team is ready to proceed with polishing the system, preparing a beta launch, and documenting the deployment process. This week marked a turning point where development transitioned from experimentation to optimization, setting the foundation for a functional, user-ready product.