Real-Time Location Changes with MongoDB Realm, Change Streams, and Mapbox

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.

Location Geofencing with MongoDB, Stitch, and Mapbox

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.

Static Website Deployments to MongoDB Stitch with Hugo, Git, and Travis CI

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.

Developing Alexa Skills with MongoDB and Golang

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.

Leaving HERE and Going to MongoDB

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!

Developing A GraphQL API With Node.js And MongoDB

While REST APIs are amongst the most popular when it comes to client consumption, they are not the only way to consume data and they aren’t always the best way. For example, having to deal with many endpoints or endpoints that return massive amounts of data that you don’t need are common. This is where GraphQL comes in.

With GraphQL you can query your API in the same sense that you would query a database. You write a query, define the data you want returned, and you get what you requested. Nothing more, nothing less. I actually had the opportunity to interview the co-creator of GraphQL on my podcast in an episode titled, GraphQL for API Development, and in that episode we discuss GraphQL at a high level.

You might remember that I wrote a tutorial titled, Getting Started with GraphQL Development Using Node.js which focused on mock data and no database. This time around we’re going to take a look at including MongoDB as our NoSQL data layer.

Developing A RESTful API With Golang And A MongoDB NoSQL Database

If you’ve been following along, you’re probably familiar with my love of Node.js and the Go programming language. Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing a lot about API development with MongoDB and Node.js, but did you know that MongoDB also has an official SDK for Golang? As of now the SDK is in beta, but at least it exists and is progressing.

The good news is that it isn’t difficult to develop with the Go SDK for MongoDB and you can accomplish quite a bit with it.

In this tutorial we’re going to take a look at building a simple REST API that leverages the Go SDK for creating data and querying in a MongoDB NoSQL database.