React Native Wordle

This is the project carried out for the course of Engineering of Mobile Systems at the Free University of Bolzano. The specification for the project is available at the following repo of the Professor Robbes Romain Julien.

Method of development

The project is built over the original solution available on the branch original-snack of this repo or on the Snack published by the professor.

The following features were then implemented:

• Dictionary API integration (mandatory, 2pt): the application uses Wordnik for retrieving random words and clues on the answer.
• Persistence (1 pts): using AsyncStorage the application stores data about games in an unencrypted manner
• Sharing (1 pts): the application creates a text message showing the tiles of the game and their status
• Challenges (2 pts): using QRcode and SvgXML and Expo linking the application paints a QR code that encodes a JSON object representing the game, at the same opening the app via a linke like via a QR reader (e.g. Google Lens) it starts a game.
• Advanced Dictionary integration (2 pts)
• Dordle: eternal edition (2 pts)

The application makes use of Wordnik for retrieving word-data. The API key included is the one for testing purposes, that may be more limited than a private one.

Note: all the detailed explanations of the original assignment can be found at the link of the assignment repo.

Running the project

The project was built using react-native and expo. Therefore, it is necessary to install expo via Node and/or Yarn. You will also require either a physical or a virtual device running either IOS or Android.

This project was developed using Android as a testing platform, therefore the instructions will only contain how to run on Android, since for developing on IOS you are required to own a Macintosh

The steps for running the project are the following:

1. Download the repo, NodeJS, Yarn (it is possible to install it via Node) and the needed dev-tools (you can choose to install just single components or to use AndroidStudio to install the various required SDKs and additional DevTools)

2. Once installed and downloaded the repo, one needs to build the expo project by using the create-expo-app command as shown on Expo's Documentation

3. Once the project is correctly created and all the modules listed in the package.json are installed (expo prefers using Yarn for installing react packages) you can run the start command (listed also in the package.json) in order to start Metro Bundler.

4. For running the program you have to have a device connected via Android Debug Bridge which can be either physical or virtual (virtual devices require Virtualization to be enabled on the computer). On the device you have to have installed ExpoGo unless you want to have a standalone application (it is recommended to use ExpoGo because it reduces the overhead of having to convert the application to Android on its own and moving it to the device).

The project was developed using the setup proposed above, but it may not be the only/optimal solution for running the project. The project could also be executed online using Snack, but the website lacks the dedicated computing power to run the application, so bundling/deployment may take a while on Snack.

ExpoGo

Advantage

Using ExpoGo rather than a standalone application is that it is possible to bundle and apply changes to the code instantaneously (which is the entire point of platform independence), avoiding the process of recompiling the project from scratch to Android/APK and then running it separately.

Disadvantage

ExpoGo runs the application on a specific port of the device, this port may change from one execution to the other, therefore rendering the challenge mode impossible to execute unless the IP/port of the application matches the one contained in the QR code.