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Detailed Requirements & Architecture

Team 3

Tom Walsh, Jason Ballantyne,

Jonathan Farrell & Seán Keyes

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Technology

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Database

Reliability
Familiarity
Widely Used

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Production

Compatibility
Efficiency

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Back End

Django:

Batteries-Included
Community

GraphQL:

Prevents under/over fetching

If we move on to look at the Back End, we have decided to use the Django framework as well as GraphQL which is an open-source query language for APIs.

Django implements the Batteries Included philosophy– For example URL routing, authentication, a template engine and database schema migrations are all included with the Django framework. This is a major advantage of Django, for example if we compare all this included functionality to an alternative such as Flask which is only considered a light-weight framework with minimalistic features.
Secondly, Django’s community are helpful and actively working on making the framework more beginner-friendly and stabilizing the framework while adding new features.

Our decision to choose GraphQL over RESTful APIs was due to its ability to not over or under fetch data. REST responses are known for either containing too much data or not enough of it, creating the need for another request. GraphQL solves this efficiency problem by fetching the exact data in a single request.

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Front End

React:

Performance
Industry Standard
Ease-of-Use

Bootstrap:

Fast & Time-Saving Framework

If we move on to look at the Front End, we have decided to use the React as well as Bootstrap.

React boosts the performance of an application through its various features such as virtual DOM that enhances the speed of web applications by removing the heavy framework codes present in bootstrapping libraries such as JQuery.

Although react isn’t just about its super rendering speed. It also contains a host of features that allow us create amazing front end designs, this is why react is considered an industry standard and used by the likes of Facebook, Netflix, Instagram and Amazon.

React is also considered relatively easy to learn and contains reusable components which allow for quick building and well structured user interfaces.

Bootstrap is an agile framework which is quite faster than other frameworks. It saves time due to its standard ready-made coding blocks, responsiveness, and cross-browser capabilities.

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Data Flow

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Functional Requirements

Realtime Information
Group Travel
Pricing
Favourites
Mobile Friendly
Interactive Map
Connection to other modes of transport (Irish Rail, Luas, etc.)
Google login

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Non-Functional Requirements

Performance
Security
Reliability
Maintainability

We will now look at the non-functional requirements of our application.

Firstly, the performance of our application should be quick in terms of searchability and loading times. The performance of react on our front end should cater for this.
Secondly Security - Our application should be secure through SSL certificates and https. User credentials should be securely stored and comply with GDPR regulation. Both Django and docker should ensure this security is preserved.
Thirdly Reliability - Users are depending on our application to get to a destination on time. This requires us to have an accurate prediction model to forecast the bus times.
Lastly Maintainability – The application should not require a complete overhaul to manage. This is helped by React’s reusable components as well as Django’s batteries included framework.

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Thank you

Questions?