Backend architecture for mobile application.
Check the app your yourself by simply downloading an apk file and installing it on your android device: https://github.com/BimberTeam/BimberApp/releases/download/1.0/app.apk
 Jakub Myśliwiec |
 Jakub Perżyło |
 Sebastian Kuśnierz |
Have you ever felt the need to met new peoples that love the same type of alcohol as you? Peoples, that like to party the exact same way as you? Now Bimber makes meeting those people possible.
Bimber is a tinder-like app in which you can instead of searching for love search for parties and drinking. You can discover new people by swiping them just like in Tinder but what's different is when you match with another person, you form a party group. It means that other thirsty souls can discover you as a group so more people can party together. You can accept or reject potential party-goers in a dedicated view, it works like voting - if 50% of the group members accept the candidate, he's in. You can add people you discovered to your friends' list with whom you can later create a new group or simply invite them to an existing group. We also implemented a well-known feature you may recall from Snapchat - a localization map. It helps users to see where they currently are so they can meet together. Just like in Snapchat stories, each group exists for a limited time. Make sure you get in touch with people you like as after 4 days all group history will be gone forever.
During working on that project we learned a lot about team cooperation. We often work simultaneously on the same code base so we have to develop good task management. Luckily GitHub had a great tool for that (Projects). As we worked in a team, we learned how important it is to write clean and readable code, so other team members could easily understand it. At the end it turned out that creating app with team is way more exciting cause you can discuss every ideas together and work out the best solution.
To develop our backend API we decided to use a couple of interesting technologies including:
- Graphql
- Graph database
As we all know dealing with the social network can be tricky that's why we went for neo4j as our storage solution and to build upon that we decided to use neo4j-graphql-js library that almost seamlessly transfers our predefined graphql schema to proper database queries and mutations.
Of course, using neo4j-graphql-js requires using node.js which we all were happy about. Working with node.js and apollo the library was a breeze. Besides using neo4j database we decided to use redis just for chat implementation as it is fast, takes a low memory footprint, and has simple data structures that were sufficient for the task. Of course to backup code quality, we used typescript that helps to catch potential bugs that come out due to javascript nature.
Every social network needs photos, right? To avoid dealing with external services we decided to use a custom image service, a golang server for better performance.
Full description of frontend technologies is available here
Right now backend server is deployed on DigitalOcean so all you have to do to start using app is to download it from here.
If you want to test the app locally here is quick guide:
Make sure you have installed:
- Docker
- Docker-compose
- Flutter
Then just copy and paste the following commands to run server:
git clone git@github.com:BimberTeam/Bimber.git
cd Bimber
docker-compose upThen you have to modify server url in mobile app. Firstly clone repository using the following command:
git clone git@github.com:BimberTeam/BimberApp.gitNext open .env_dev file and edit it replacing DigitalOcean server ip with your own ip. Then you can build and install your app on your mobile device using the following commands:
cd BimberApp/bimber
flutter build apk --split-per-abi
flutter installHere you can see demo of most features our app offers
