Pictrait

I built this app as a project to see how social media apps, and more generally client-server applications, work. My attempt at replicating a simple photo-based social networking app is the culmination of this.

The main idea of the app is that users upload photos for their followers to see in a newsfeed-style view.

The working app is illustrated below:

Features

• User
  • Login
  • Sign up
  • Perform account updates (eg: changing username or full name)
• Profile
  • Follow a new user
  • Unfollow a given user
  • View the profile of another user
  • Search for other users based on their given name
• Photo
  • View a newsfeed-style page with photos of users that are followed
  • Like a user's photo
  • Upload a new photo

Technology Stack

Back-end API

• Google App Engine- standard environment used and hosted on the Google Cloud
• Java 8- used in conjunction with build management tool, Maven
• Google Cloud Datastore- to store the various entities in the app such as User, Photo, Like, etc..
• Google Cloud Storage- to store and serve the user's photos they have uploaded

Front-end iOS Application (Swift)

• Swift 3- in conjunction with CocoaPods and with a build target of iOS 11.0

Basic dataflow outlined in the following picture:

Project Structure

The project can broadly be divided into two main sections:

Back-end API

• Files relating to this portion of the project can be found under the pictrait-api directory.

The division and organisation of the backend API is outlined in the following diagram:

The relations between entities in the Cloud Datastore are outlined in the following database diagram:

Front-end iOS Application

• Files relating to this portion of the project can be found under the Pictrait directory.

Structure for the iOS application outlined below: