Technology Side of wikibus.org
I just noticed that I forgot to change the permalink of my last post. I intended to write about tech, but ended up writing about buses only. Too bad, but I’m not going to change that now. I this post I will write a little bit more about what I’m actually implementing for wikibus.org
Implementing all of it may be a daunting task. Because I want to build an entire website and API I’m aiming for the
full-stack. On top of that I want to actually do something cool 
, which for developers mean using a really
cutting-edge technology or publishing a reusable package.
And so my goals here are quite ambitious. I am
- using RDF for as my data structures,
- want to implement the domain CQRS-style as event-sourced async models,
- use Nancy to serve data from the server because Web API sucks balls,
- hope to create a real REST API with the help of Hydra,
- intend to use Web Components and Polymer in the browser to consume my API.
Divide and conquer
Because there’s a lot of pieces to this bus-lovers’ puzzle, I created a wikibus organization, where I keep separate repositories for each element. Except the dedicated front and back end I intend to keep the other libraries as independent as possible so that they can be reused in other projects. I for one will be publishing my reusable code on NuGet.
I will be gradually mentioning all of the below in future blog posts.
wikibus backend
This is the main API and server side, where all the Nancy code and data-access will live. I will need a number of components
to make it happen. Not all of it is available as open-source packages just yet, so I’m left with no choice but to implement
some 
myself.
Currently I’ve just hit a 0.1 mark with an updated a deployable database of brochures. In a short future I will publish a post where I share some details about how I convert my data from SQL Server to RDF and test the results.
The main interest of wikibus.org will of course be the knowledge about public transport. Because of the complexity I probably will use a form of CQRS with eventually consistent RDF models. This will hopefully buy me flexibility in adapting to changes in how I want to process raw data. We’ll see.
JsonLD.Entities
First component I’ve built as a reusable library is a simple serializer, which can convert POCO object to JSON-LD and vice versa. It is basically an extension of the immensely popular Newtonsoft.Json package. I wanted too keep JsonLD.Entities as simple as possible and so most of it works by convention.
There are some examples and this package is the first wikibus library already available on nuget.
Nancy.Rdf
Second part that I find missing for a .NET REST API, which would serve RDF data are serializers of RDF media types. I love Nancy and so I wrap it is my weapon of choice for building a RESTful web service. On top of Nancy I am building a set of response processors, which will be able to serve POCO classes serialized to RDF formats. Unsurprisingly I’m using the library I introduced above combined with dotNetRDF so that I can return not only JSON-LD but also most other RDF formats: RDF/XML, Turtle, n-triples and more.
Once the code stabilizes, first step will be to add some documentation. Then I may consider breaking concrete dependency on dotNetRDF and offer a RDFSharp alternative package. Finally I shall add support for low-level RDF objects, that is raw graphs, datasets and SPARQL results.
Argolis
The newest member of the wikibus.org crowd is called Argolis, which further extends Nancy.Rdf above to add support for Hydra, which is a vocabulary for hypermedia-driven applications. It means that hydra is the means to describe the API in a way where the client is actually driven by hypermedia
I named it after the mythical (and modern) part of Greece. I chose that name, because it is where the mythical beast Hydra originates from.
Hydra drawing by Andrew Jian.
Similarly as with Nancy.Rdf, this is very new stuff.The goal for both Argolis and Nancy.Rdf is to provide a supper-duper-happy-path so that the usage is as simple as possible. I’m still ironing out some details and as soon as I’m happy with the API and features I will add some documentation and publish a NuGet package.
www.wikibus.org
Lastly here’s the main front-end library. I’ve purchased a bootstrap template ages ago and started some work on that ages ago but there is a lot I want to accomplish in this space too: