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PuppeteerJS: an open-source NodeJS library
We use PuppeteerJS for scraping the website as the library allows the backend to run a headless (a code-only) version of Chrome to load the websites on.
A headless version of Chrome doesn’t use as much resources and as such can be easily run in any server, such as the hosting servers that we are using.
PuppeteerJS also have high-level API control of the Headless Chrome browser via the DevTools Protocol. This allows for the code to read the structure code of the website directly and to access the required parts of the website.
Morgan: HTTP request logger middleware for Node.js
Winston: Another logger for both develop and production environment.
CORS: NPM package for solving Cross Origin Resource Sharing problems
dotEnv: abstracting environment variable and url configurations in .env file, making swaping of environment between development/production feasible.
UI design - Material UI
Material UI (MUI): an open-source frontend framework for React components based on Google’s Material Design
We decided to use MUI as it would make the development of our app quicker and easier. Since MUI defines its own components, we can use them to quickly design the UI of our app, instead of spending time writing our own CSS classes
Since we had decided to use React for our frontend, and MUI uses React components, it was only logical we used MUI over other non-React frameworks such as Bootstrap
Additionally, some of our team members already had some experience using it. The extensive documentation also means it will be quick and easy for the team members who haven’t used it before to pick up, as well as debug
By using MUI, we can keep our frontend UI theme consistent, and even customise it to suit our needs