The Equator: End of Support

The Equator: End of Support

 

   As mentioned in a previous post last year, we created a new mobile app called "The Equator" which was a PoC app project for a graded Distributed Systems university project. The app fetched engineering equations, their names, and picture links of the equations from an online database. It was a very difficult to develop app, due to the original source code (an unfinished project from a another team) originally being written within the restrictions of MIT App Inventor 2. Although the project was completed for the DS Class, it was quite hackly-built, having to cache the online database via an ugly, offline pseudo-database of key-value pairs in order to store the database.

   Unfortunately, the online "database" (which was actually a list of TinyWebDB list of tag-value pairs online) was hosted by Google Cloud Compute. This service is free to new users for a certain trial period, and then requires a subscription fee to use afterwards. Due to this app just being a PoC (and not being a very well written app, due to the restrictions of MIT App Inventor), and having to require a subscription fee to continue hosting the database, we are choosing not to continue this project further. Google deletes databases for those who wish not to pursue hosting a database after the trial period. The source code archive (which is meant for educational purposes) on The Equator page will be updated within the next few days with instructions and the software to replicate the server elsewhere, as well as the database contents.

-Tamkis