meeple.space

Meeple.space is a Meetup-like site for planning and joining board-gaming events. It has a Rails back-end API and uses Backbone on the front-end. It connects to an external XML API from BoardGameGeek.com to populate its database of games and uses the Google Maps API and Geocoder for hosts to select locations.

How to use:

• Use the live site OR
• Clone or Extract ZIP for this repo
• Run rake db:create
• Push to heroku or the host of your choice

Major Challenges:

• Cannot make AJAX requests for external XML data because of the same-origin rule - this must be done on the backend with Ruby.
• Parsing XML data with XPATH & CSS queries
• Create a RESTful JSON API that does not leak protected user data.
• Restrict Google location queries just to the city the user has selected.

Tech used in project:

• Ruby
• JavaScript
• Rails 4
• Backbone.js
• Underscore
• jQuery
• PostgreSQL
• pg_search gem
• BCrypt
• rest-client gem (for requests to external XML API)
• Nokogiri (for parsing XML)
• jbuilder
• New Relic
• Heroku
• AWS S3
• Figaro
• Paperclip
• Combodate
• Moment