message_board

A microservice based full-stack social media website.

I wrote the backend services with several different languages, frameworks and styles of SQL ORMS. I did this for fun, to be exposed to several solutions for similar problems and to better learn which libraries I actually do enjoy.

The front end is heavily based on Facebook and Twitter. Many of the colors used are from their sites.

Reflections About Options

• Go and Python are my two favorite options. The two languages and their libraries were the easiest to use and learn.
• Python had the easiest coding. Python code is essentially pseudocode, and the Django framework and ORM has many clean methods. Django, however has an unnecesarry amount of configuration, which makes it annoying for small projects, and while type hinting is good, it's nowhere near the level of a staticly typed language, which increases the need for error checking and input santizing.
• Go is the most lightweight of the options. I had to do more things manually because of fewer features in Gin and Go's http built-in library, however, the simplicity of Go makes it easy to write helper functions. Go does have it's disadvantages. While Go is easy to learn, it does things differently than other languages. There were a couple times this caused issues, for example, I wasn't returning json data from a struct because I didn't know Go required the programmer to explicitly declare marshable fields. Go libraries don't have as many features as other languages, so having a personal library of helper functions would help in future projects.

Lessons Learned

• Microservice-based Architecture
• Authentication Basics

Services

• auth-gin: GoLang and Gin microservice for handling authintication security
• posts-express: Typescript and Express microservice for storing posts
• profile_django: Python and Django microservice for storing user settings and profile information
• api-actix: Rust and Actix api server for front ends to interact with, does not need a database
• spa-react: Typescript and React application for the web browser front end

Languages Used

Typescript

Go

Rust

Python

Frameworks Used

Express

Gin

Actix

DJango

React

Databases And Orms Used

PostgreSQL

GORM

Prisma

DJango ORM

Developer Instructions

Ports Used

• 3000 spa-react
• 5000: api-actix
• 5001 auth-gin
• 5002 posts-express
• 5003 profile-django

Commands

• ./api luanches main api server
• ./migrate_profile luanches profile microservice
• ./posts luanches posts microservice
• ./profile luanches profile microservice
• ./migrate_profile runs database migrations for profile microservice