Nicho

I use Jekyll because the research project required a good documentation for others. The GitHub wiki would have been okay too, but a own static website gives you more (design) freedom. It can be easily hosted with the help of GitHub Pages. It can also be used as a blog, which is very handly for everyone, who wants to create one.

I use Neo4j because the data structure was a graph, based on the underlying research papert, so the project had to follow this concept. However, the research project doesn't take the full potential of Neo4j or an other graph database, because it doesn't apply any graph related algorithms. So the whole architecture could have been also modelled in a simple relational way (PostgreSQL/MySQL/etc.). However, Neo4j with its very easy to learn query language Cypher was in the end a very good choice, because other researchers were able to set up a new testing scenario also on the database level with much flexibility.

I use AngularJS because it was back in the days one of the interesting and most hyped frameworks. Especially the two-way databinding and the amount of free angular-components from the community made the development of this research project very easy and fast. React on the other side, was just on the geginning of its rise and Angular promised a more SPA approach, also with HTML & CSS templating, which I had experience from the past. React with JSX was too new for me and a bigger overhead, so I tried AngularJS. Today with no backward support of Angular 2.x/ - /8.x, I personally switched to Vue.js as it shares many concepts from Angular & React and is easy to learn.

I use Socket.IO because the application has 2 frontend clients, which need to communicate in real-time. The backend-server handles the communication between these two clients via websockets. Socket.io is very easy to set up in Node.js and ExpressJS.

In the research project, the 1st client shows panoramic videos in a so called cave system (it is the VR setup of our research lab, which consists of three big screens, which are specially arranged, so the user experience the videos more immersive), the 2nd client controls the videos/locations of the 1st client.