People geek out about a bunch of different things. And sometimes, those geeky endeavors have a great deal of crossover. Like comic books and tech. So imagine my geeky giddiness at the latest Portland side project using the Orchestrate platform: a visual exploration of the Marvel universe called MarvelousDB.
How’s it done? Well, with the Marvel API and Portland’s Orchestrate:
Marvel recently opened up an API for its character and comic data, which includes all of the characters, what comics they appear in, and a lot more. After poking around with it for a little while, I decided I wanted a more visual way to explore the characters and the comics, and that this would be a great project to build off of Orchestrate. We could use graph search to explore the relationship between characters and comics, as well as full text search to explore the data.
This project was pretty fast to build. It took a little time to import the data from the Marvel API and to do the design and frontend work, but the actual backend code and database work was really fast (less than a day or so). Orchestrate makes it very easy to make the social connections we use and to get the data in and out.
Think you’d like to do something more than search? The project is also available on Github.
And as an aside, this is a project that involved two companies from the last class of PIE, Orchestrate and Stand In. I have to say, that it’s pretty awesome to see the camaraderie that developed during the class continuing to produce results. This is what the Portland startup community is all about.
Oh. And if you’re interested in making so equally strong connections with awesome startups, you should apply for PIE.
.@antonyfalco That is total @piepdx synergy at it's finest! (Good read too!) @realasa @avoiceandname @OrchestrateIO http://t.co/v3yjjKXKOf
— Kris Pennella (@littlepots) April 8, 2014
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For more information on the project, see the Orchestrate blog post. To completely blow several hours geeking out on Marvel superheroes, visit MarvelousDB.
