Wiigo runs on Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Heroku. The backend provides RESTful APIs and responds to frontend requests with JSON data.
Wiigo uses a PostgreSQL database.
Other notable dependencies include:
- Cloudinary file storage for easy custom-sized images without warping
- BCrypt for password-salting and hashing for a secure authentication system
Cloudinary was used to host all images, allowing custom sized images to be served passed on the requested path.
Wiigo utilizes the React.js framework and follows the Flux architecture to deliver the frontend, delivering a rich single page app.
Node package manager (npm) installs and manages all frontend dependencies.
A post-install script is configured so that webpack bundles all of the frontend files after the deployment to Heroku is complete.
Webpack nicely bundles all of the frontend components and Flux pieces. The bundled file is in /app/assets/javascripts and included in the main application.js file.
All of the React components, Flux action creators, API utilities, dispatcher, and stores are located in the frontend directory.
Wiigo was written in the newer and more powerful ES6 javascript. Babel is used to down-convert all jsx and ES6 javascript to ES5 syntax, ensuring that legacy browsers will run the site without any problems.
jQuery is used only to make AJAX requests to the backend.
Site styling was done with Sass to allow more powerful css matching and inheritance.