About The Project

This is an example of a Nearby search REST API for searching nearby hotels, in this case all routes are accessible by anyone but in a real life scenario the search API is going to be used by users and only the hotels API or at least the writing parts of it will be accessible to the hotel owners.

API Endpoints

Here are the available endpoints for now:

API for search

GET /v1/search/nearby This endpoint returns hotels based on certain search criteria. In real-life applications, search results are also paginated so we need to add parameters for that.

Request Parameters:

The hotel object returned contains everything needed to render the search result page. But we may still need additional attributes such as pictures, reviews, star rating, etc., to render each hotel detail page when we visit them.

In the future we can also add more complex searches like let a user define an area which will be formatted as GeoJSON and then send that to the backend and return only hotels in that area. Or even add search filters like star rating, price, etc.

API for hotels

The APIs related to an hotel object are shown in the table below:

Read/Write Ratio

Since most of the time we’re going to use the search for nearby hotels API and also the view information about an hotel, most likely we’re going to have an high read volume. The write on the other hand is low since it happens only when we’re adding, removing or updating an hotel page.

Most of the time for a read-heavy system, a relational database such as MySQL is a better fit than other solutions. But for ease of development we’re going to use MongoDB with its built-in support for Geospatial Queries which are easy to use than MySQL Geo Queries.

Data Model

Hotel Object

Point Object

An example of the Point format is the following:

{ 
    type: "Point", 
    coordinates: [ 40, 5 ] 
}

Of course we will use a GeoSpatial Index for efficient processing of spatial operations.

High-level Design

The high-level design diagram is the following. The system is divided into two parts the location search service API and the hotels related API.

So normally the website should act upon a database cluster but for semplicity we’re going to use only one database. The database cluster is setup using the primary-secondary architecture, where the primary database handles all write operations and replicas of that primary database which are secondary are used for read operations.

Built With

This project was built with the following technologies:

Getting Started – Setup

By default you’ll need to provide a .env file or set up the environment variables for your operating system, these are required variables that you need to setup:

Also be aware that for the API to work you need to set up a Geo Index inside MongoDB using the following commands inside MongoShell:

db.collName.createIndex({fieldName: "2dsphere"})

License

Distributed under the GPL v3 License. See LICENSE for more information.

GitHub

View Github