ARCHITECTURE.md

Panorama toolkit architecture

The Panorama toolkit is a collection of JavaScript components used by the American Panorama atlas. This file documents how the toolkit fits into the architecture of the entire atlas.

At the core of American Panorama is CartoDB, which hosts the data for the application.

We use CartoDB in two ways:

1. To dynamically generate tiled raster map layers for the application's basemap. Further documentation about the CartoDB basemaps is in the panorama-template repo: https://github.com/americanpanorama/panorama-template/tree/master/basemaps
2. To serve GeoJSON objects for rendering by various Panorama toolkit components.

Note that although American Panorama depends on CartoDB, the Panorama toolkit components do not require CartoDB as a backend.

TODO: more explanation