compareware/README.md

CompareWare

This application is still a prototype, with only a landing page publicly available thus far.

Use-Cases

• Authorised users can create Items: Working, no authorisations
• Items can have Tags: Implemented

To Implement

• Authenticated Users can write Reviews referencing one or more Items and Tag them (for example with a URL linking to a more in-depth review)
• Users can trust (the reviews of) other users, creating a web of trust

Database Design

Tags are Key-Value like in OpenStreetMap or Wikidata, that is why they need own tables. Initially I planned having a shared Tags table for both Reviews and Items, but that would have been impractical because a Tag either belongs to a Review or an Item, so two separate tables would have needed to been set up to track the referenced object, with a risk of anomalies: Technically there then could be no mapping in either table for a Tag, or two, both of which are semantically incorrect - because a Tag without reference is useless and editing the Tag value for an Item should not affect a Review and vice versa. Considering the simplicity of a Tag, creating two separate tables prevents those cases without overhead and normalizes the schema.

For a fully normalized and implementable view, every many-to-many relationship needs another table which will be visible in a diagram generated from the schema.

Developer Setup

direnv allow
devenv up

Open up http://localhost:8000 and you can create, edit and delete items with key-value tags.