Context and Scope

This chapter describes the environment and context of biking2: who uses the system, and on which other systems biking2 depends.

Business Context

Biker

A passionate biker uses biking2 to manage his bikes, milages, tracks and also visual memories (aka images) taken on tours etc. He also wants to embed his tracks as interactive maps on other websites.

Daily Fratze

Daily Fratze provides a list of images tagged with certain topics. biking2 collects all images for a given user tagged with “Theme/Radtour”.

GPSBabel

GPSBabel is a command line utility for manipulating GPS related files in various ways. biking2 uses it to convert TCX into GPX files. The heavy lifting is done by GPSBabel, and the resulting file is managed by biking2.

Arbitrary websites

The user may want to embed (or brag about) tracks on arbitrary websites. He only wants to paste a link to a track on a website that supports embedded content, to embed a map with the given track.

Technical Context

biking2 is broken into two main components:

Backend (biking2::api)

The API runs on a supported application server, using either an embedded container or an external container. It communicates via operating system processes with GPSBabel on the same server.

The connection to Daily Fratze is an http based RSS feed. The feed is paginated and provides all images with a given tag, but older images may no longer be available once the owner decides to add a digital expiry.

Furthermore biking2 provides an oEmbed interface for all tracks stored in the system. Arbitrary websites supporting that protocol can request embeddable content over http knowing only a link to the track, without working against the track or map APIs themselves.

Frontend (biking2::spa and biking2::bikingFX)

The frontend is implemented with two different components; biking2::spa (a Single Page Application) is part of this package. The SPA runs in any modern web browser and communicates via http with the API.

Business interface	Channel
Format conversions	System processes, command line interface
Collection of biking pictures	RSS feed over Internet (http)
Embeddable content	oEmbed format over Internet (http)
API for business functions	Internet (http)