Meet the Reactive Dashboard
In 2017 Rahul Kumar joined forces with the team behind the Travel Open Partnership to reactivate the project as a framework for coding large single-page web apps. The first application was the TOP collaborative booking engine, a mobile-first portable Javascript widget that allows users to book hotels, flights, tours and car rentals in a single place from any website and mobile device.
Together with chat bots and native mobile apps, the booking widget was just one of the frontend interfaces sitting above the HTAP ReactiveAPI developed by TOP as a multi-purpose, distributed, message-driven API.
As the TOP project grew in complexity and started powering business travel applications, the need for a dashboard able to handle interactive charts and Big Data exploration challenged the team either to develop a different frontend for the purpose or revisit the building blocks of the single-page web app to accommodate an analytics dashboard format.
Developed from the first principles listed in the Reactive Manifesto, present day Reactive Dashboard is a reusable framework built on Angular v5 for programming complex web applications that are responsive, resilient, elastic and message-driven.
Current applications of the Reactive Dashboard include IoT reporting interfaces, financial services, event networking applications and of course online booking websites and Progressive Web Apps.
Based on the current rate of adoption, the team has decided to open source the codebase in 2018 and allow a wider community of developers to join and contribute publicly to the project.
The Reactive Dashboard original design was started by Rahul Kumar, then lead developer with Sigmoid, initially using AngularJS.
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HTAP ReactiveAPI
The concept of a CRUD RESTful API that could serve both transactional and analytical workloads from the same data repository was the result of several technology iterations completed by Silviu Preoteasa and collaborators in the marketing technology department of online travel website Hostelworld between 2015-2017.
The elegance of serving hotel availability searches for millions of users from an ACID-compliant transactional database while providing them with personalized recommendations from a distributed database suited for analytical queries and machine learning algorithms was finally brought to life when newly emerged Travel Open Partnership unveiled its business model in December 2017.
In a surprising turn of events though, the HTAP ReactiveAPI did not meet its first commercial application in the travel industry – instead it was used to power a broadband IoT service (Wi-Fi analytics platform) collecting device data from sensors placed in multiple geographical locations. Naturally the reporting interface made available to business users for data exploration was developed using the Reactive Dashboard framework that forms the other component of the ReactiveIO stack.
As the Travel Open Partnership released the first version of the TOP collaborative booking engine in Q1 2018, the HTAP ReactiveAPI finally returned to its initial purpose, serving information on 1.2mn hotels and 300 airlines in a single-page, mobile-first web application built using the same Reactive Dashboard framework for the frontend.
As of 2017 the HTAP ReactiveAPI is powered by the OrientDB multi-form database, Spark/Scala, Redis and Akka.
Developer access to a sandbox hosted environment loaded with live hotel data is available on-demand and a paid license is offered for commercial applications with an option for managed services provided under SLA in partnership with BigStep and OrientDB Enterprise Services.