I’m trying out a documentation schedule for a new project I’m starting called NewsMelon. It will be a combination of information retrieval and text summarization. That is, NewsMelon will find multiple news articles about a story and provide a summary of that information. The goal will be to build an MVP within the next two weeks, using a Node based webserver with Flask for the NLP and React/Redux for the front-end. I haven’t built anything major with Node.js yet, so I’m hoping I’ll get acquainted with some useful packages and Express.js.
The tentative tech stack is listed below:
Back-End:
- Node.js running Express.js as the static file server / CRUD REST API
- MongoDB as the main DB ( to experiment with a JSON based data storage system )
- Python Flask as an endpoint to access NLP functions
- NLP: NLTK/Goose Extractor/Newspaper ( to extract article data from news article URLs )
- LevelDB? via LevelUP for full-text-search on the Node webserver
Front-End:
- React: UI
- Material-UI: Basic Material Design style guide with React components ( for dev speed )
- Redux: front-end state management ( may not use if the application is simple enough )
- SASS: for stylin’
+ webpack for building/npm for package management
With an ambitious goal of 2 weeks ( maybe 6 weeks to be realistic ), I’ll try to post major updates for insights I gain and issues I come across every few days.
ALEX NGAI 