We wanted to visualize data related to Coronavirus. We have decided to use Wikipedia page views to show how the news and any recent trends and events are reflected on the internet. Another important goal was to learn how to manage a server using cloud technologies. We chose Amazon Web Services.
User experience is extremely easy. Users go the website and can see several graphs depicting data for several Wikipedia page views trends. They can hover on each of the graphs to see the exact page views for a certain day and Wiki page.
We made a Node.js web application using the Express framework. We have created a Node.js server on AWS for our web app. To get the data from Wikipedia we used Wikipedia API. TO draw the charts we used Highcharts.
We have encountered many issues during the project. We have a team of three people all working on different OSs and so inevitably we had issues related to that. We decided to make our project a web app, having no teammember with web development experience. One fun (and sad) lesson learned from working on the project: never debug a web app with an ad blocker activated!
- Sometimes, you need to refresh a page a couple of times to get all the graphs fetched.
