rkm_world_data

World Data Experiment

Summary

World Data webapp/module is an informational and practice application. Once completed it will integrate several custom and publically available APIs and web services. The end goal is to port the web application to a mobile app on the Google store.

How does it work?

The visitor selects a country from a dropdown menu to learn some interesting but high level facts of a particular country. Selecting a country initiates calls to parse through .ini files (create navigation and set configurations), .json files (format of web service and API calls) and .xml files (custom - parsed for sitemap) and other external resources to render several panels of information.

RESTful Services

• getCountryData - custom
• currencylayer - pubic API - exchange rate & currency converter | https://currencylayer.com/
• NOAA - public API - weather and climate data | http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/webservices/v2

Technologies

• Twitter Bootstrap Framework
• JQuery & JQuery UI
• LESS
• SMACCS Compliant
• Angular2

//TODO Create charts using D3js

Features

Alphabetical Navigation - leverages JQuery libraries & custom JQuery UI styles to override default bootstrap css.

On the back-end

$_POST['country_code'] captured in a session cookie is passed through a series of functions - simulating a domino effect. Simply choosing a country, the application displays country facts e.g. capital, population, government type and currency provided by a custom REST API. The function processdata($file) processes the JSON file returned by the API and provides each external API/WebService with the appropriate parameter. The currency code is passed to the CurrencyLayer API which returns realtime currency conversion rates. The country code also is passed to the NOAA API which displays the weather for the area.

Three webservices are invoked based on the country_code:

WS_country

Custom API | Returns the specific country information stored in a json file.

WS_currency

Public API | Returns currency conversion based on visitor's country selection

WS_weather

Public API | Returns the weather data based on visitor's country selection.