Technical details

For everyone interested, here are some details about the software that was used for the development of guidemate and about the technological aspects.
If you rather search for information about using guidemate and the idea behind it, have a look at the FAQs.

Hosting

The platform is run on Amazon EC2 servers within the EU. Uploaded images and audio files are saved on Amazon S3 and delivered directly from there.

Server-side software

The application uses the Play Framework 2.6 and is written in the programming language Scala. As a data base, we use mongoDB.

The Play framework's internal web server is combined with nginx. For SSL encryption we use a certificate by GeoTrust.

Frontend software

For the frontend, we use CoffeeScript and JSX with React.
The following JavaScript libraries are used:

• jQuery (plus some jQuery plugins)
• Lodash
• jPlayer for playback of audio tracks
• FileUploader for AJAX file uploads
• some other small libraries

For the styling of web pages, we employ SASS with Compass. For graphic editing, we mostly use Inkscape and GIMP.

For the display of maps, we use the Google Maps JavaScript API and MapBox.

Android App

The Android app is developed with Android Studio, although not in the standard language Java, but – as the server software – in Scala. The build tool is SBT with the SBT Android plugin.
As map software, we use osmdroid with map data from MapBox.

iPhone App

The iPhone-App is a completely native app, written in Objective C with XCode.
As a map service, we use MapBox.