Technical overview

CodeCombat is a single-page web application, stitching together many different open-source projects and high quality services.

Application Layers

Database: MongoDB. Pretty standard database responsibilities.
Web Server: Node.JS, follows REST principles and a CRUD interface. Provides most of the security and maintains data integrity.
Client: The single-page web application which follows the MVC pattern, using Backbone.

All layers use the same data format: JSON. Integrity and model meta-data is maintained using JSON-Schema.

/app: Client application source. Code written here runs in the browser.
/public: Client application output. This is what the browser fetches from, and is built from /app, /vendor and /test.
/test: Testing files.
/vendor: Third-party resources for the client(like jQuery, Bootstrap, and so on..) (server resources are governed by npm).
config.coffee: Brunch config, mainly for compiling /app and /vendor into /public.
package.json: NPM config: mainly for defining what packages the server requires.
server_config.js: environmental variables for the server.
server.coffee: main server file.