I have added my first web application to this website, my “Biking Weather Suitability Forecast” application. It was a project both to help me improve my understanding of Spring Boot, Bootstrap, and REST calls to free weather APIs; and out of my own interests.
For years, I enjoyed using the Weather Underground iPhone application, largely because of its “Smart Forecasts” feature, which allowed specifying desired temperature ranges, risk of precipitation, and wind speeds for physical activity outdoors. This was a great thing for me to decide which days I might attempt bicycle commuting.
However, after The Weather Company bought out Weather Underground, their “improvements” to the app made it, in my opinion, and apparently that of many other people, ugly and unusable. Furthermore, the “Smart Forecasts” feature was dropped from the free version.
Not finding anything that seemed to fulfill the requirements as nicely as the previous versions of the free application before these changes, I decided to try recreating that functionality as best I could, using data available from free weather forecast APIs. The result is my Biking Weather Suitability Forecast, which shows and color-codes biking weather suitability, based on conditions I have set, both on a daily basis for the forecast week. The daily suitability is the worst hourly suitability during my specified biking commute time of 6:00 AM – 6:00 PM, if included in the forecast hours for that day, or on whatever hours of that day are included, in the case of the last day for which hourly forecast values may be obtained.