Movers

Visualizing movement from Twitter data. Code pertaining to the GEOG597A class project: Visualizing twitter flows

Developer Notes

Program Logic

Server side:

• websocketServer.js:
  • Takes request in form of filter.state, transforms to query and returns data as array of json objects

Client side:

• main.js

  • Initialize the application

    • initialize web socket connection (init_socket())
    • initialize buttons and user interface (init_btns())
    • initialize filter (filter.init())
      • initialize filter.state which is empty at this point (contains all filter settings)
      • Get initial set of data. This is unfiltered (filter.state is empty). Therefore, the first chunkSize user objects from the DB
      • Get some general information from the database to set up the user interface. That is:
        • Total number of users in the DB
        • All languages in the DB
        • All countries in the DB
        • What else?
        • This info will be stored in data.nUsers, data.languages, data.countries...
    • init_btns(), which creates all buttons and defines their event handlers

  • As defined in the button event handlers, whenever the user interacts with the interface, the event handler as its last action calls filter.filter(), which sends the current filter status to the server and requests the data. [This might make the app slow, should we have a 'request data / submitt' button instead?