Develop technical requirements and specs

[svametcalf]

Issue to discuss technical specifications.

General Thoughts

I would like this app to require as few pieces as possible. To do this, I believe the simplest stack will be:

• A NoSQL database for storage. This allows us to be relatively freeform about how our reports are stored, but can enforce more structure than a straight up text document.
• A Single Page App framework for the frontend. Because of the map component, lets just use JavaScript throughout.
• Mechanism for hosting/serving data and frontend code

Needs/ Wants for SPA framework

• Talks to REST API
• Bootstrap Compatible
• Reusable Components
• Nice developer experience

Alright, you caught me. I was just making up requirements that EmberJS meets. I like it and it seems to work, so I think we should use it.

Needs/ wants for NoSQL DB

I am less opinionated about this one. There are a lot out there, and it will probably be a lot of time to evaluate all of them.

Needs:

• Needs to talk to Ember, using some REST system, preferably, without another application in the way
• Needs to handle authentication and authorization for users
• Needs to handle binary files in some fashion.
• Would be nice if compatible with Docker

Candidates:

• CouchDB
• Any others?

Thoughts on hosting / operations

DOCKER !!!!!
and nginx.

[svametcalf]

With regards to the database, CouchDB looks like it is going to meet our needs quite nicely.

Pros

• built in authentication and authorization
• easily deployed using docker
• simple to use, (or so it seems)

Cons

• Hard to see if authorization model is going to work with our model (see Develop data model  #4 )
• Have not evaluated ease of querying, (which is based on MapReduce JS functions).

More info needed

• interface with Ember (though this looks promising.
• authorization model
• actual configuration with Docker
• unit / integration tests