Reactivating development of this application

[davenquinn]

Now that @amyfromandi has joined us, we are preparing to reactivate development of this application to enable editing of stratigraphic columns.

This application prototyped several approaches that are now becoming standard in Macrostrat v2:

• Microservice architecture
• PostgREST for API route development
• Multi-page, server-rendered react application for web services (here, Next.js, the current web codebase uses Vike)

It is also a bit fragmented:

• It relies on the column-footprint-editor application for managing column topology
• That, in turn, relies on the Mapboard/topology-manager to solve topology (and a fairly old and inflexible version).

I propose that we split the codebase to

1. Put table/view definitions in the macrostrat repository
2. Put other API code and topology-management service in separate containers as appropriate
3. Move the frontend React code to the web codebase, and migrate it from Next.js to Vike to match our current approach

This will allow us keep the app closely tied to the rest of Macrostrat's user-facing code and take advantage of our CI/CD, etc.

This iteration of the app is a fairly straightforward re-implementation of the original Dacite column editing tools (PHP). However, there are other approaches to editing columns. We've created some other prototype apps that might be worth borrowing from eventually (note, these are currently not running anywhere):

• stratigram: prototype image-oriented app for capture of measured sections (could be another view here)
• naukluft-app: column editor focused on the specific case of a field project in Namibia
  One step would just be to run these apps for testing and get a sense of what aspects might be worth harvesting.