We thought our technical audience might be interested in a rundown of what’s happening on the back end. LocalData has gone through a lot of technical iterations to keep everything fast and responsive in the field. We’re building with off-the-shelf components to make this system as simple as possible.

• Node: A simple node server handles the basic app operations, including geodata.
• MongoDB: A flexible datastore, mongo handles all our survey responses. We’re excited about the enhanced geodata support in MongoDB 2.4.
• PostGIS: To support custom base data, we’re using a simple PostGIS database setup. Our goal has been to see how lean we can keep the operation – but I’m seeing CartoDB in our future

On mobile browsers, we’ve done a lot of work to keep the experience responsive. We’re using JQuery Mobile to provide nicely styled form widgets. We’ve thought about rolling our own, smaller subset of JQM features. Our profiling work showed that the biggest performance targets were in our code, though – more on that soon from Prashant.

On the desktop, our dashboard is built entirely in Backbone. The pieces are changing quickly, and it lets us keep up.