Neighborhood Drawing Tool

What it is

• Choose what data you want to study.
• Draw a polygon or circle on a map.
• Get a beautiful map of your study area.
• Produce a report of various characteristics of your study area.

How it works

• Uses MAPC's Metro Boston DataCommon API to retrieve geographic data and metadata (currently a local implementation: datacommon.io will eventually host the API)
• When you select a dataset, the map is overlaid with that data.
• When you draw a polygon or circle as a study area, you'll get all geographies that intersect with your drawing.
• Soon, there will be a report section that lets you set up and save statistics on your study area.

Getting Set Up for Development

It's quite simple, really. We're using Browserify to keep the code modular.

• Clone the repository: git clone git@github.com/MAPC/neighborhood-drawing-tool
• Install Browserify using NPM: npm install -g browserify
  • Don't have NPM? Install Node and NPM
  • On a Mac with Homebrew:
    • brew install node
    • curl https://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

Compiling Modular Javascript

Inspiration for the modular design we'd like to achieve: Addy Osmani's post on Large-Scale JS Architecture.

Eventually we'll get Grunt to run some build tasks for us, but in the meantime, we'll use browserify.

Run browserify scripts/main.js > scripts/bundle.js to bundle all main.js with all of its dependencies, since the browser doesn't know how to handle require statements yet.

Development Guidelines

• Write modules. We're aiming for good, decoupled, object-oriented code, even if it's not that, yet.
• Make edits to modules and to main.js. Don't change bundle.js, it won't do anything.

Style

• If you've got a list of variable statements, or an object with multiple attributes, please start all lines but the first with a comma and space, like the below.

var object = { something: "placeholder" }
  , text   = "a phrase"
  , number = 11.001