Working through APIs with CampDad

There are many ways to solve a problem, and often times the simple solution is not always available. Because of this, it is important to be able to pivot and resolve issues using the resources one has. Our group experienced something like this during the development of our project, “CampDad”.

CampDad is a camping planner application which acts as an informational database for campgrounds throughout the United States. It was meant to simplify the process of researching campsites in way that was simple, efficient, and stylish. Unfortunately, the APIs which provided such information free of charge were severely limited. We were able to find one API, the National Parks Service API, which managed to provide most of what were were looking for.

Notice how I said “most” and not “all”?

While the NPS API did have the essentials such as weather overview, location overview, accessibility, and a description of each campsite, one thing that was noticeably absent was images. Not being able to see what the campsite looks like is a big problem for a camping planner app. Unfortunately, no free image search API was comprehensive enough to have images of every single campsite in every single national park across the country. Rather than scrap the idea, we decided to create our own images. The body of our website was dynamically generated cards which would display information for all the campgrounds within a national park. When the user searched a park name, each campground would have its own card which showed the information requested from the NPS API. The initial plan was to generate an image of each campsite, however when that idea didn’t work out, we soon discovered that it was possible to dynamically generate a Google Maps display into each individual card.

The Google Maps API is able to take in longitude and latitude coordinates as search queries. Because of this we used the NPS API to return the longitude and latitude of each campsite, and then used those coordinates to generate each individual map using the Google Maps API. Essentially, we found out we were able to use the dynamically generated responses from one API to dynamically generate a response from a different API. So with each user search, the APIs would create a chain reaction of dynamically generated responses that would all get appended on our html page in the form of cards.

The end result was an informational card that displayed a Google Map of each campsite while also being individually Streetview compatible within each card. The new cards look even better than they would if they had been still images and they are more useful for planning a camping trip as well.

Our group showed incredible resolve throughout the development of this project. Rather than cutting corners when our original design faced complications, we used newly discovered concepts to not only work around these issues, but also managed to improve upon our original design.

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