This is a project for the advanced software engineering class at UZH.
Team: Yasara Peiris - Ning Xie - Ali Yassine - Yuchen Zhang
AScout is an online web application built to provide travelers an efficient and reliable way of finding their ideal AirBnB rental. This is done by leveraging proximity and public transport data from the Google Maps API and a Berlin Airbnb open dataset , while providing a clear and user friendly user interface.
Travelers often have an itinerary or a list of places that they want to visit when they travel to a city, however online vacation rental marketplaces like AirBnB do not show information concerning proximity to their itinerary. However, it is often challenging and time-consuming for traveler to find ideal rental locations, especially if they are not very familiar with their destination. This motivated us to create a solution that helps travelers plan their trips, without worrying about the location of their accomodation. Our key functionality would have the user plan their itinerary using the user interface, and then we would be able to suggest neighborhoods that would be the most convenient in terms of proximity, and public transport.
More details about the project can be found in Wiki - About AScout .
ReactJS was chosen to build an interactive UI. It is preffered over other javascript frameworks because it ensures readability and makes testing easier. In addition, we use the google-map-react component, which allows us to render any React component on the Google Map. HTML5 and CSS were also used as they are the de-facto standards.
The Spring Boot Java framework is used to drive the back end of our web application. It is chosen because it eliminates boilerplate configurations and code, reduces overall development time, and thus increases efficiency. In addition, the Java Client for Google Maps Services is used to add the functionality of the Google Maps API's to our back end.
MongoDB is the NoSQL database chosen for this project. We created collections in our database to store the Berlin Airbnb open dataset. The back end serivces connect to the database using Spring MongoDB Repository.
Docker is used for the purposes of containarization and deployment of the different microservices. Each microservice is provided with a Dockerfile so that they can be put into seperate containers. The GitHub Action workflow, Build and Deploy to GKE is used to build and package each microservice into a docker container that is pulished to the Google cloud Container Registry and deployed to the corresponding kubernetes cluster for dev and prod environments.
GitHub Actions is used to automate the CI/CD pipeline. It is mainly used for the convenience of building, testing, and deploying the code straight from GitHub. In addition, it includes workflow templates, that were useful as a starting point and to save time. CI/CD scripts can be found in github workflows .
The back end testing environment is composed of JUnit5 for writing unit tests and JaCoCo for code coverage metrics. For the front end testing environment we intend to use the React testing library. In addition, SonarQube is used for automatic static code analysis. The testing environments are integrated to run in the GitHub Actions workflows (example script) .
More details about testing and CI/CD can be found in Wiki - Testing and Continuous Integration .
Details on Javadoc and API documentation can be found in Wiki - Documentation .
Details on project organization can be found in Wiki - Project Organization .
Each module, namely the ascout-client frontend, browse-service and calculator-service has their individual Dockerfile. There are three environemnts, namley local, development and production. The following instructions are how Ascout is run on each environment.
git clone https://github.com/ningxie1991/AScout
cd ascout
docker-compose up
# ctrl + c or use the command 'docker-compose down' to exit the application
The first build could take a few minutes. After that, the whole application (both frontend and backend) will be running on localhost. AScout website can be accessed at http://localhost:3000
GitHub Action is used to deploy each module from the repository's develop branch. Build and deployment scripts can be found in github workflows (scripts starting with "Dev-"). Latest build in the development/staging environment can be accessed at http://34.65.48.29
GitHub Action is used to deploy each module from the repository's main branch with a release tag. Build and deployment scripts can be found in github workflows (scripts starting with "Prod-"). Latest release in the production environment can be accessed at http://ascout.org
To use the website go to: ascout.org and follow the prompts. When you first access the website select Berlin as the city you wish to visit. Then you will be presented with choices. Click the "Calculate the ideal neighborhood" button, and start entering the destinations you wish to visit. After you are done, click the "find neighborhood" button and you will shortly be presented with the listings from the three most convenient neighborhoods for your itenirary. You will be able to see all the listings on the side bar and on the map. You can hover over the listings on the map to see a preview, or you can click on the more details button to see all the information including a link to the original AirBnb listing.
Youtube link for the demo: https://youtu.be/3gt_QzZeZeI
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
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Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent