Rentsmart

-- DECOMMISSIONED Mid 2022 --

Project Background

Project came out of Department of Neighborhood Development (DND)
Qlarion built
When originally developed open data portal didn’t exist/wasn’t in its current state to be used could use ckan API
Launched publicly early August 2017 - no known issues or outages since launch

Iterations

Been rebuilt a few different times
Original version was built with additional data sources, but was parred down to show valuable info quickly
Initially very GIS focused

Technology used

Hosted on heroku [migrated from Qlarion to City's heroku in July 2018]
Uses heroku resources - uses single production dyno
Could be moved to AWS [down the road], but would need to create a PHP container in the current AWS setup
Built in php and javascript
Bootstrap front end [Sebastian advised on this at some point]
Data services (SAP) sits on City side. Every night loads/nightly job into postgres database (data services drops data then PHP to post gres to stage the data/make it look nice). SAP = ATl platform. PHP script to get data to website.
Assurance that the data runs before page load is set within the code.
index.html - served on apache

Some known data sources:

Areas for improvement

Adjust dynos and other heroku resource (to bring cost of app down)
Adjust data source/feed set up
Revisit entire structure: Qlarion estimated would probably take 1 week of time to switch the data sources and restructure data

DNS redirect for rentsmart.boston.gov => data.boston.gov/dataset/rentsmart

Heroku app backed up to github, and database and some creds saved on s3 cob_digital_archives.

Last updated 1 year ago