Working on this project has been both a struggle of trial and error, as well as a learning curve for using useful tools that I have previously had no knowledge of to perform the task at hand. Moreover, I feel like I am atypical when it comes to understanding the different coding languages, especially considering that I am in the senior year of achieving my bachelors in CS. I feel like I struggle with actually remembering most of the information from the past courses due to the abundance of information that is available on the Internet; too much information is almost overwhelming at times.

In regard to our teams project, A Life Challenge, we are aiming to create a simulation that responds to time in ticks per second, with including creatures, food resources, environment objects, environment topographies, and the animation of those objects within the environment. In order to achieve this, our team decided on using JavaScript for the frontend processing, while using Python as our backend database. This combo stores the object’s data on the backend, and sends that to the frontend to be manipulated and displayed to the user. To achieve this combination we have to include the necessary frameworks/libraries.

Now, some of the technologies that are introduced in this project are as follows:

• React / Electron (JavaScript framework for frontend development)
• Python’s Flask framework
• Python and JavaScript

There are other technologies featured in our project, but these two frameworks that work on frontend and the backend are the most vital to the project.

From my understanding of React/Electron framework, it allows a developer to create a frontend application where the user can directly interact with a GUI and see things happening either on a browser window or application window. Now, for the Flask framework, this technology is primarily used as a database of information that stores the essential information about an object’s (creature, food, environment, in terms of our project) attributes and values. The user won’t be able to directly interact or see the data that is worked on in the flask’s backend, but from my understanding, we can use this framework with React/Electron such that the frontend grabs the data of the objects from the backend, and displays it to the user.