building-limit-height-plateau-api

building-limit-height-plateau-api

This service contains one REST api endpoint. When valid json is posted to this api endpoint, then the service will find the coordinates for all of the features of building_limits and plateau_heights. These coordinates will save records of building_limits and plateau_heights to local mongodb collections.

steps to run proto/Makefile as intended

1. run make install
2. run make

steps to run locally and hit locally running API

1. docker-compose up
2. curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"your_JSON_body_here": "potato"}' http://localhost:9002/v1/buildingdata

What I would do differently next time.

1. Avoid gRPC. I like gRPC. It handles a bunch of validation automatically. However, getting gRPC to generate code that would accept two-or-more-dimensional took a lot of time to figure out. In addition, the solution for the 2+d json arrays isn't clean or very stable. I did learn a bunch of protoc tricks in the meantime though, so that was good.
2. Investigate what geographic polygons and intersections more thoroughly sooner. I thought that I had a good enough understanding to design a my own solution. It wasn't until later that I understood what the problem of polygons and intersections was actually was. Had I understood this sooner, I would have ditched gRPC sooner so that I could have easily injested geoJSON as a standardized format. There are probably REST validators for geoJSON already on github. I would have also learned more early that none of the available Golang tools for polygons were missing a key feature. I investigated https://github.com/paulmach/orb, https://github.com/golang/geo, and https://github.com/twpayne/go-geom only to learn that none of them support automatic calculations of the intersection/common-polygon from two given polygons. Had I known that sooner, then I would have investigated if there were some packages for this in a different langauge (such as JS or PHP).