geek_tree

MDG WOC Project

GeekTree

Geek-Tree is a project under Winter of Code, a month long programming project aimed to bring more students into open source development. It is organised each year by MDG and SDS labs of IIT Roorkee.

Features

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• Users can sign up into this app and specify their fields of interests, which they can change at a later stage as well. Based on their selected fields, they'll be shown posts on their home screen.
• Users can star the posts they like, and view them later under pinned posts as well.
• The app also allows users to add posts, and select the interests under which they want the post to be visible.
• A separate fragment, showing all the interests is also available, through which a user can view posts according to interests.
• User can also view the profiles of users who follow an interest.

Development Environment

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The app is entirely written using Kotlin in Android Studio.

Architecture

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• Architecture Pattern - MVVM
  • Model-View-ViewModel architecture pattern has been followed to retrieve posts, interest list of user, the list of users following a particular interest, and also their information. RecyclerView and CardView are used to display different lists in the app.
• Architecture Components
  • Livedata
    • Data is being observed using livedata.
  • ViewModel
    • ViewModels process the DataSnapshot fetched from the FirebaseDatabase by LiveData, and emmit it, which is observed by the views.
  • Navigation Architecture
    • The app follows Single Activity Pattern, and navigation between the different fragments is executed using navigation graph.

Firebase

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Following Firebase components have been used:

• Firebase Authentication
  • For sign in
• Firebase Database
  • To save users' information, their interests, and posts.
• Firebase Storage
  • To save posts' pictures and profile image of users.

Interface CallBack

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The app makes use of callback to check, during sign up, if a username already exists. This was used to make sure that a user signs up only if the username is unique.

DataBinding

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Databinding has been used to fetch the information of current user to display in his profile.

Libraries Used

For cropping image

api 'com.theartofdev.edmodo:android-image-cropper:2.8.+'

For animated like button

implementation'com.github.jd-alexander:LikeButton:0.2.3'

For picasso, to load image into posts and profile image

implementation 'com.squareup.picasso:picasso:2.5.2'

Acknowledgement

• Kaustubh Trivedi
• Nikhil Agarawal