GI Bill Comparison Tool

Welcome to the US Department of Veterans Affairs GI Bill Comparison Tool, a web application for veterans to calculate their educational benefits and research approved programs.

View the Application »

How it Works

The application is a simple static website generated by Jekyll. There is no server-side component – the JavaScript in gib-comparison-tool.js does all the data handling and calculations in the browser. There is only one page: index.html.

Building the Site

Jekyll is used to generate the static content for this site. Jekyll requires Ruby and the jekyll gem. Read more about getting started in their documentation.

To build the site, simply run jekyll build in the command line. The site will be generated into the ./_site directory. The contents of this directory can then be hosted on any server's public directory. To view the site locally, run jekyll serve, and a development server will start at http://localhost:4000/.

Updating the Data

The application uses a lot of open data from a CSV file named data.csv in the _data/ directory with the following headers (in this order):

facility_code	institution	city	state	zip	country	type	cross	ope	bah	poe	yr	gibill	student_veteran	student_veteran_link	vetsuccess_name	vetsuccess_email	eight_keys	correspondence	flight	grad_rate	grad_rate_rank	default_rate	avg_stu_loan_debt	avg_stu_loan_debt_rank	indicator_group	salary	calendar	tuition_in_state	tuition_out_of_state
String	String	String	String	String	String	String	Integer	String	Integer	Boolean	Boolean	Integer	Boolean	String	String	String	Boolean	Boolean	Boolean	Float	Integer	Float	Integer	Integer	Integer	Integer	String	Integer	Integer

The application doesn't query the CSV, but instead looks for data in the api/ directory. A Rake task is used to parse the CSV, normalize the data, and build the JSON fragments that will populate the api/ directory.

To generate the API, run rake build. This should be done each time a change is made to the CSV file.