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Shareabouts Architecture

Shareabouts (SA) is composed primarily of two parts: the Shareabouts API service, and the Shareabouts front-end application.

Shareabouts Architecture

The Shareabouts Web Application

The web application is mostly client-side JavaScript, using Backbone and Mustache templates.

There is also a small, nearly static server-side layer which serves a few purposes:

  • Static media - CSS, images.

  • Configuration - there is a config file that allows various customizations, notably the forms that the client displays for user input. See the config documentation.

  • Proxy - In order to ensure that the JavaScript layer can make AJAX requests to the back-end API even if it's running on a different domain, we send those requests through a simple HTTP proxy.

The current implementation of the server side is in Django, but it uses so few features that it could fairly easily be re-implemented with nearly any web development platform.

The Shareabouts API

This is a separate web service. It provides a RESTful API for creating and retrieving geographic points and metadata about them. It also includes a management UI for creating datasets and inspecting the raw data stored by the back end.

For more about this, see the Shareabouts API docs.

Shareabouts Data Model

The data served by the Shareabouts API and used by the web app is composed of just a few kinds of flexible objects:

Data Sets

A user of the API can create any number of "data sets". All location information you create or retrieve is associated with a single Data Set. Currently, the SA web app can only be configured to work with a single Data Set.

Places

A Place represents a geographic point and can have a few data attributes stored on it:

  • data - this is an arbitrary JSON object.
  • submitter name - a string.
  • dataset - a Place belongs to a single Data Set.

Submissions

A Submission represents some data attached to a Place. Every Submission has a type, which is represented by its parent SubmissionSet (see below). A Submission has these data attributes:

  • data - an arbitrary JSON object containing the submitted data.
  • submitter_name - a string.
  • parent - the SubmissionSet it belongs to.

SubmissionSets

A SubmissionSet is a group of Submissions attached to a single Place. A SubmissionSet has these attributes:

  • place
  • submission_type - a string identifying the type of these submissions; for example, "comment" or "rating" or "vote".

Activity

Activity represents all user activity on the site. Any time you create, modify, or delete a Place or Submission, an Activity is generated, identifying who did it, what happened, and when.

These are used for the "activity stream" that appears on the right sidebar on the default Shareabouts design.