Tag: mongodb

Creating a Multiplayer Drawing Game with Phaser and MongoDB

July 29, 2020

Nic Raboy

When it comes to MongoDB, an often overlooked industry that it works amazingly well in is gaming. It works great in gaming because of its performance, but more importantly its ability to store whatever complex data the game throws at it.

Let's say you wanted to create a drawing game like Pictionary. I know what you're thinking: why would I ever want to create a Pictionary game with MongoDB integration? Well, what if you wanted to be able to play with friends remotely? In this scenario, you could store your brushstrokes in MongoDB and load those brushstrokes on your friend's device. These brushstrokes can be pretty much anything. They could be images, vector data, or something else entirely.

A drawing game is just one of many possible games that would pair well with MongoDB.

In this tutorial, we're going to create a drawing game using Phaser. The data will be stored and synced with MongoDB and be visible on everyone else's device whether that is desktop or mobile.

June 30, 2020

Nic Raboy

When it comes to location data, MongoDB's ability to work with GeoJSON through geospatial queries is often under-appreciated. Being able to query for intersecting or nearby coordinates while maintaining performance is functionality a lot of organizations are looking for.

Take the example of maintaining a list of business locations or even a fleet of vehicles. Knowing where these locations are, relative to a particular position isn't an easy task when doing it manually.

In this tutorial we're going to explore the $near operator within a MongoDB Realm application to find stored points of interest within a particular proximity to a position. These points of interest will be rendered on a map using the Mapbox service.

June 25, 2020

Nic Raboy

When it comes to modern web applications, interactions often need to be done in real-time. This means that instead of periodically checking in for changes, watching or listening for changes often makes more sense.

Take the example of tracking something on a map. When it comes to package shipments, device tracking, or anything else where you need to know the real-time location, watching for those changes in location is great. Imagine needing to know where your fleet is so that you can dispatch them to a nearby incident?

When it comes to MongoDB, watching for changes can be done through change streams. These change streams can be used in any of the drivers, including front-end applications with MongoDB Realm.

In this tutorial, we're going to leverage MongoDB Realm change streams. When the location data in our NoSQL documents change, we're going to update the information on an interactive map powered by Mapbox.

May 30, 2020

Nic Raboy

For a lot of organizations, when it comes to location, geofencing is often a very desirable or required feature. In case you’re unfamiliar, a geofence can be thought of as a virtual perimeter for a geographic area. Often, you’ll want to know when something enters or exits that geofence so that you can apply your own business logic. Such logic might include sending a notification or updating something in your database.

MongoDB supports GeoJSON data and offers quite a few operators that make working the location data easy.

When it comes to geofencing, why would you want to use a database like MongoDB rather than defining boundaries directly within your client-facing application? Sure, it might be easy to define and manage one or two boundaries, but when you’re working at scale, checking to see if something has exited or entered one of many boundaries could be a hassle.

In this tutorial, we're going to explore the $near and $geoIntersects operators within MongoDB to define geofences and see if we're within the fences. For the visual aspect of things, we're going to make use of Mapbox for showing our geofences and our location.

April 1, 2020

Nic Raboy

MongoDB Stitch can do quite a few things, some of which include GraphQL, functions as a service, and triggers. However, another awesome feature is in its ability to host static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, the core components to any static website.

Static websites are becoming more popular due to their performance and how inexpensive it is to host them at scale. Popular generators include Hugo, Jekyll, 11ty, because of how easy it is to write and maintain in a format like Markdown and convert to HTML.

In this tutorial we're going to see how to create a static hosted website using Hugo and automatically deploy changes to Stitch through a continuos deployment pipeline consisting of Git and Travis CI.

January 31, 2020

Nic Raboy

The popularity of Amazon Alexa and virtual assistants in general is no question, huge. Having a web application and mobile application isn't enough for most organizations anymore, and now you need to start supporting voice operated applications.

So what does it take to create something for Alexa? How different is it from creating a web application?

In this tutorial we're going to see how to create an Amazon Alexa Skill, also referred to as an Alexa application, that interacts with a MongoDB cluster using the Go programming language (Golang) and AWS Lambda.

September 20, 2019

Nic Raboy

About a year ago, I joined HERE Technologies as the Lead Developer Evangelist after having been at Couchbase prior. I wrote about this transition in an article titled, Moving from Couchbase to HERE, the Adventure Continues.

In the year that I've been at HERE, I accomplished quite a lot in Developer Relations. Some of those accomplishments include:

Starting the HERE stream on Twitch.
Revamping the technical content production strategy for the blog and YouTube channel.
Improving how feedback is acted on within the organization.

While I did so much more within HERE, this is where my story ends and a new one with MongoDB begins!

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