A gigantic pub crawl


I wanted to put together a gigantic demo to show (and test)  the push notification capability of Ephemeral Exchange to orchestrate many things across many platforms. We'll be linking up all these things, with the orchestration between them completely automated by Effex subscriptions, so there is no need for any direct integration between any of the components for them to be able to pass data.

In summary, this demo is just for fun , and will generate random places of a given type within a given geographic region defined by a polygon of longitude and latitude pairs. For the videos in the demo I'll be using bars in the city of London and in Greenwich Village, NY. 


These are main components being glued together with efx


Here's what should happen

  • The control parameters are defined in a Google sheet. 
  • The demo is controlled an monitored from a sheets control add-on. Changes to cache are shown here and are detected by subscribing to an efx push notification. It uses the JavaScript and Apps Script efx api client.
  • A Google cloud function (pub-suggestor) is called from time to time by the pub-requestor to generate a random place of the given type and in the given area. This cloud function uses the Google Maps API on Node.js and is described here, and uses the Node efx api client.
  • A Google Sheet is updated when a new place is detected by the crawl-declarer. Control subscribes to an efx url notification on its behalf, which sends a post to an Apps Script webapp when there is something of interest to look at.
  • A JavaScript webapp (crawl-mapper) subscribes to an effex push notification and plots the area and any places as they are generated. It also calculates routes between places. When enough places have been generated, crawl-declarer declares a pub crawl and freezes that route. Any new items that arrive in the meantime are collected for the next pub crawl. An update to this might be to simulate progress along the route, add something for people to look for pub crawls to join, and send them emails with route details   - but all that's for another day.

Here's an example of a random pub crawl created in Greeenwich village.


And maybe I'll add some other stuff too - let's see how it goes.

Write ups





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