Authors: Adrian Bernat and Edward Koroteev

WebHelper Rocket is a functional web application created using Rust's Rocket framework. Taking inspiration from mobile helper programs, such as Siri and Alexa, WebHelper takes in input from a text field and, based upon that input, can perform a variety of tasks. The goal of this project was to create a modular, functional Rust web application that was designed in such a way that adding new features was seamless and effortless. Throughout the course of the project, we had to figure out ways to deal with the various issues that came up and keep pushing forward with the code no matter what. The project uses Rust's Rocket framework for routing, and Handlebars to create dynamic web pages in response to the requests that arrive. While there were some features that we had difficulty implementing, such as redirects to outside pages using the same POST function, we more or less created all of the applications that we wanted in our project. Valuable experience came via coding with library functions, iterators, and other concepts that were brand new to us, and we feel that our skills as coders grew greatly. Anything is possible with enough determination and research!

Tasks to be implemented:

• Calculator
  • The idea is to make it an integer calculator that accepts a string, i.e. "52+47*3", and spits out the correct answer. This is finished and supports parenthesis.
• Dictionary API for definitions
  • The idea behind this was to be able to pull up the definitions of certain words using the web helper. This ended up working neatly and is fully functional.
• Craigslist Web Scraper
  • The craigslist web scraper takes a search term from the user and compiles a list of the first 10 results from craigslist.
• Easter Eggs!

This program runs using Rust. Please refer to Rust's install page for instructions on how to install Rust. Since this project runs on the Rust Rocket framework, it requires one to be running Rust Nightly. This can be done by executing rustup default nightly. This will update your nightly version, then set that as default.

To run this web app, simply type in cargo run while in the app directory. It will download dependencies, and once finished, it will launch and instruct you to access localhost:8000. Navigate to localhost:8000 in your preferred web browser to see the web app. Please reference this instruction sheet for usage directions until the instructions are implemented within the web app. This app assumes a valid internet connection exists. Many features utilize web pages and web scraping to return content, and the program will throw a panic if no internet access is present if it is trying to use internet access.

• calculate <statement> can be used to perform a calculation. The calculator takes in infix notation and supports parenthesis.
• craigslist <search term> can be used to retrieve the first 10 items from a craigslist search result.
• define <English word> can be used obtain the definition of any word from oxforddictionaries.com. The command is fully functional and will inform the user if they enter something that is not valid, and catch that error.
• riddle can be used to obtain a riddle.
• ping can be used to get an annoying output.
• echo <term echoes the given term.
• ip returns the current IP address of the user.

(c) Copyright 2019 Adrian Bernat
Email: [email protected]

(c) Copyright 2019 Edward Koroteev
Email: [email protected]