chadhamre / art

Art API

This API will serve works of art from the Tate Modern art dataset and allow comments and users to be added.

To run this project locally:

1. Clone this repository locally
2. CD into the directory created
3. Make sure you have node and yarn installed on your machine
4. Run yarn to install dependencies
5. Run yarn start to run the server
6. This will start a local sever that will be accessible at http://localhost:3000/api/art

Choice of Technology:

• I chose to build this backend in node.js, although I'd be tempted to do a serverless setup for something like this in the future.
• I used koa.js for networking, which has some advantages over Express.

Database:

• To make this project easy so share, I used an AWS hosted MYSQL database.
• So that you could access it, I included a .env file in this repo which contains credentials to connect. I would of course, in normal circumstances, never put credentials in a repo.
• Where possible I am relying on the database logic to validate data, rather than doing it memory on the server. Please look at the 'create.sql' file to see how the tables have been structured.
• TODO - tighten security on database.

Endpoints

/api/art - GET

• This endpoint will return an array containing all art and associated comments
• TODO - add pagination to endpoint, in this MVP I set the endpoint to return the first 1000 results.

/api/art/:id - GET

• This endpoint will return an art record and comments given a calid id.
• TODO - add response messages when user requests an invalid ID.

/api/art/:id/comments - POST

• This endpoint will create a new comment in the database.
• Sample POST body: {"name":"Jimmy","content":"Hate it"}
• Note: Content-Type must be set to 'application/json' for the body to be received
• TODO - add validation and error response messages.

/api/users - POST

• This endpoint will create a new user in the database.
• Sample POST body: {"name":"Chad Hamre","age":35,"location":"Canada"}
• Note: Content-Type must be set to 'application/json' for the body to be received
• TODO - add validation and error response messages.

Scope

There were three main feature that I did not complete in the allotted time:

1. Pagination - I would want to add a pagination solution to the retrieve all docs endpoint.
2. Validation - I would want to add validation to the comments and users endpoints, although some of the validation is done by the database.
3. Error Messages - I would want to add helpful error messages to the request that receive 4XX status responses.

Next Steps

Once the missing functionality called out above with the TODO notes, I'd do the following to tighten up the project:

• Add JWT for authentication
• Create Swagger documentation for endpoints
• Deploy server to Heroku