Where Traveler is an American based publisher of travel guides. We implemented a mobile version of their city guides based on, and using content from, the existing web site.

The app allowed users to browse listings for various Points of Interest such as restaurants and museums. Results could be ordered by proximity to the device, filtered by category, and then saved as bookmarks against the users profile.

Initially two cities - London and Paris - were offered as separate apps. Eventually, the ability to download different cities into the app was added, and the number of cities was expanded to over 100.

My Role

I developed a CMS to support importing the data straight from the publishers feeds, and to perform editing and filtering. Once ready, functionality for publishing the data to the app made the entire process controllable by the client.

Tech Stack

I developed the iOS app in ObjectiveC.

The package server was responsible for serving the city content to the app. A versioning system based on Git was developed to enable partial updates to be served, saving the amount of data the app would download considerably.

The CMS was a javascript Single Page App developed using BackboneJS, hosted by an Express/NodeJS server.

As well as performing CRUD for the web app, the NodeJS server also interfaced with the publishers CMS, downloading and parsing the content. The import process had to deal with print quality sized images, which were queued and resized to a more app friendly format.

Initially MongoDB was used as the primary database. This was replaced by Sqlite and Ecset acting as the ORM.