Planes of Imperial Japan

A fast and simple skin for a database of planes used by the IJA and IJN, using some nokogiri magic. Currently available to browse online here.

Notes

This is a little project made while waiting for a plane at Haneda Airport;-)

It is a simple parsing, re-organisation and presentation of information from the List of aircraft of Japan during World War II wikipedia page, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Setup

The catalog runs locally and needs a working ruby installation - I'm currently using Ruby 2.7.2 but the code is not version-sensitive. Dependencies can be installed with bundler in the usual way, then you are good to go:

bundle install

Building the Plane Database

The bin/update.rb script builds a local cache of the plane database. NB: this is sensitive to major changes in the wikipedia pages, but for now works fine.

Options:

$ bin/update.rb
        Usage:
          bin/update.rb all                      # reload plane data and ensures the image cache is complete
          bin/update.rb cache                    # ensures the data and image cache is complete
          bin/update.rb show_categories          # show all categories used by current records in the database
          bin/update.rb (help)                   # this help

        Environment settings:
          BACKOFF_SECONDS # override the default backoff delay 0.3 seconds

Testing the Loader Code

The code has rspec coverage:

bundle exec rspec

Or with rake

bundle exec rake spec

Or with guard

bundle exec guard

Running the Site

After updating the cache, the index.html presents a very snappy searchable and filterable listing of the plane database. It's a simple web page using some basic Bootstrap and Datatables features with a little custom javascript.

Here's an example, with a simple search applied. Each entry has links to the main Wikipedia page as well as search links for the plane on Scalemates and Google.

Note: the catalog is loaded from JSON file, which presents a security issue if the index.html is loaded locally as a file in a browser.

In Firefox, the security issue can be overcome by disabling the security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy preference in about:config

Running with Sinatra

I've defined a simple Sinatra app in app.rb that can be used to serve the catalog locally over HTTP, avoiding the browser limitations with loading the JSON data file. Run it with:

$ ruby app.rb
== Sinatra (v3.0.1) has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from Thin
2023-09-27 19:30:43 +0900 Thin web server (v1.8.1 codename Infinite Smoothie)
2023-09-27 19:30:43 +0900 Maximum connections set to 1024
2023-09-27 19:30:43 +0900 Listening on localhost:4567, CTRL+C to stop
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:57 +0900] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 - 0.0023
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:57 +0900] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 4986 0.0068
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:58 +0900] "GET /assets/skin.css HTTP/1.1" 200 436 0.0014
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:58 +0900] "GET /assets/flag.png HTTP/1.1" 200 9226 0.0006
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:58 +0900] "GET /assets/skin.js HTTP/1.1" 200 4609 0.0016
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:58 +0900] "GET /cache/data.json?_=1695810658264 HTTP/1.1" 200 121954 0.0030
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:58 +0900] "GET /cache/images/7c698e1440838dc1b20c18ad1b61d217.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 9916 0.0019
::1 - - [27/Sep/2023:19:30:58 +0900] "GET /cache/images/700b7a3089c2fcfe092ebba221d7c9c9.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 9422 0.0016
...

Credits and References

• List of aircraft of Japan during World War II
• World War II Allied names for Japanese aircraft
• Datatables
• Bootstrap
• Sinatra Docs
• favicon.io - used to generate the favicons