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Welcome to the landscapes wiki!

Notes on the app

The app mostly follows the standard directory structure for all Rails apps. Here's an overview of the most important parts:

Gemfile - specifies the app's backend Ruby dependencies
package.json - specifies the app's frontend Javascript dependencies
/app/assets - some of the stylesheets live in here, some live elsewhere (I want to fix this)
/app/models, /app/views, /app/controllers - most of the backend functionality of the app is here (Rails is an MVC framework)
/app/jobs - contains background jobs that run on the server-side, for things like creating or extracting zip files etc.
/app/javascript - most of the frontend functionality lives here
controllers - Stimulus controllers live here
interactions, sources - these are OpenLayers-related
modelling - the flowchart-based model editor lives here
projects - the new map view that I'm currently working on lives here; long-term we want to merge the model editor into this
stylesheets - this is where the other half of the stylesheets live 😅
packs - this contains the Webpack entry points for the app - the main one is application.js; modelling_worker.js is a web worker that allows the model editor to be multithreaded
/test - the backend (Rails) test suite lives here. https://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html

We don't currently have a test suite for the frontend...

OpenLayers:
- This workshop looks quite promising - I might give it a go myself
- API documentation
- Examples
- Vector layer example
- XYZ layer example (we use XYZ tiles for aerial/satellite photography)
Rete.js: This one is a bit difficult to get started with, maybe check out the examples on their website?
React: I think the tutorial on the new Beta docs site is a good place to start because it uses the newer functional style components
D3: You probably have more experience with this than me! The only unusual plugin I'm using is d3-sankey, which you might want to check out if you haven't used it before
Typescript: This is probably better learned through experience (and I'm still new to it myself), but they do have a handbook on their website
Stimulus: This is a small js framework used to add little sprinkles of extra functionality in the admin tools
Turbolinks: You don't need to know how it works, but it's good to be aware of what it is and how it affects DOM events

Spatial reference systems (SRS/CRS) - the web app natively uses EPSG:3857, but a lot of the data we're provided with by third parties is in EPSG:27700 (British National Grid projection)
https://geojson.org is the format we use for of our polygonal and point-cloud data
Explanation of zoom levels in XYZ grids
The OpenStreetMap wiki has a lot of useful information in it

Rails getting started guide
Rails - ActiveJob: This is used for background jobs on the server-side; things like creating or extracting zip files mainly
Rails - ActiveStorage: Used to handle file uploads