Setting Up a Smart Forum App

In the last chapter, we saw what Google Cloud Platform is and what services it offers. We delved deep into one of its verticals, named Google Cloud AI, and went through all the services in that vertical. In this chapter, we are going to get started with our learning on Google Cloud AI services.. We are going to set up the base project in this chapter and build on top of it from the next chapter onward.

The topics to be covered in this chapter are:

• Design and architecture of SmartExchange
• Technology overview
• Project set up and exploration
• Deploying the base application to Heroku

Technical requirements

You will be required to have Node.js 6.13.1 installed on a system. Finally, to use the Git repository of this book, the user needs to install Git.

The code files of this chapter can be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Google-Cloud-AI-Services-Quick-Start-Guide.

Check out the following video to see the code in action:
https://goo.gl/cViHRf.

SmartExchange architecture

The application we are going to build in this book is named SmartExchange. SmartExchange is a forum application, where registered users can create threads or topics of discussions and other users can like or reply to it. SmartExchange is not a full-fledged forum application but has all the key pieces needed to showcase the idea. As we keep moving toward the end of the book, we will be adding one Cloud AI service per chapter and will finally make the forum application a smart forum application. We are going to work with the following Cloud AI services:

• Cloud vision
• Video intelligence
• Speech recognition
• Cloud language processing
• Cloud translation

SmartExchange demo

Before getting started, you can...

Setting up the project

Now that we are aware of the high-level architecture, let's get started by setting up the environment to develop the project. To develop and run the application locally, we need to have the following dependencies installed:

1. Git
2. Node.js
3. MongoDB (optional)
4. Angular CLI
5. Yarn (optional)
6. Heroku Toolbelt (optional)

Installing Git

To install Git, head over to https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git and follow the instructions on that page to install Git for your OS. Once you have successfully installed, you can run the following command to verify the installation:

$ git --version
git version 2.11.0 (Apple Git-81)

...

Setting up an authentication

When working with any Google Cloud AI service, we need to have either an API key or a
service account key set up. In this section, we are going to set up both, so you can use any
approach to explore. Before we set up the API key or a service account, we need to have a
Google Cloud project. If you already have a project, you can skip this section.

Creating the project

To create a new project, follow the below steps:

1. Navigate to Google Platform Console: https://console.cloud.google.com/
2. Create a new project using the project selector menu form the top navigation bar of the page
3. I have created a new project for this book named as SmartExchange and have given a custom project ID as smart-exchange...

Setting up code

Now that we have all the tools needed to start developing the application, we will go through the list of technology pre-requisites:

• SmartExchange application is completely written in TypeScript (https://www.typescriptlang.org). TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. If you are new to TypeScript, here is a video series on getting started with TypeScript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hADI92zCIvE&list=PLYxzS__5yYQkX-95LHG5EDxPj3tVvVmRd.
• On the server side, we are going to use Mongoose to interface with the MongoDB. Mongoose is a MongoDB object-modelling tool designed to work with asynchronous environment. If you are new to Mongoose, here is a video series on getting started with Mongoose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swWRUvluSkE&list=PLGquJ_T_JBMQ1C0Pp41sykceli8G1UGtg.
• Express is going to be our service side...

Deploying to Heroku

This step is optional and you can do it if you are interested in deploying this application to Heroku. To continue with this section, you need to have set up a Heroku account and you need to have installed the Heroku Toolbelt.

1. Once that is done, open a new Command Prompt or Terminal inside the smart-exchange-base folder and run the following command:

$ heroku login

This is your prompt for your Heroku credentials that you have signed up with.

2. Once you are logged in, let's initialize a new git repository by using the following command:

$ git init

3. Next, let's get our application ready for deployment. Run the following command:

$ npm run build
or
$ yarn build

This will run the required scripts to build the final dist folder, which will be deployed to Heroku. For everything to run smoothly on Heroku, we have added a file named Procfile that has the...

Summary

We started off this chapter by understanding the application architecture and the technology overview. Then, we installed the required dependencies and downloaded the base application. We then walked through the code and ran the application. Finally, we saw how to deploy the application to Heroku. In the next chapter, we will start interfacing with the first Google Cloud AI service Vision API and see how that can be used along with this application.