DOMINIC SIMPSON

DOMINIC SIMPSON

World GeoData app

World GeoData app

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My fascination with global statistics and geopolitics can be seen in this app, which was built by myself and one other person as part of the HTTP portfolio of Founders & Coders’ pre-Apprenticeship Bootcamp.

It uses asynchronous JavaScript to fetch and then display data/statistics relating to countries around the world: population, currency, land mass, languages, capital city, etc, as well as the current weather in the capital of the respective country. The data is fetched from two APIs: REST Countries and Herokuapp.

When the user types in the name of a country in the Search bar, the page will then be populated with data relating to that specific country, along with its flag and official name.

A couple of interesting issues relating to geopolitics came up when constructing the app. If two countries share the same name – for example, there are two countries called the Congo, and two called Korea – an option bar will come up listing both; the user will have to choose one of the two. Both sets of countries are officially differentiated by being called either the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of / Democratic Republic of’, on the one hand (somewhat ironic in the case of North Korea); and ‘Republic of’ on the other. A similar principle applies with other issues over country names – for example, if the user types in ‘China’, due to political sensitivities they will have to choose between the ‘People’s Republic of China’ (China itself), the ‘Republic of China’ (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Macau. Typing ‘Ireland’, meanwhile brings up both the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland.