##The Team
Name: Pawel Borzym, Edvardas Lasauskas, Niks Gurins, Gediminas Saparauskas
College: Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology
Course: Software Development - Y4
Module: Emerging Technologies
Lecturer: Dr.Ian Mcloughlin
##Project Motivation
The reason we decided to take on this project is because we were looking for a challenge and something new.
Imagine a website, where you can, without downloading any software, write fully fledged documents and retrieve them at any time.
Now imagine on that same website you can have an entire team working on a single document simultaneously.
Sounds good right? (Try Google Docs) Well, we decided to make an attempt at making that.
##Project Outline
Upon entering the site the user will see a "Generate document" button, which when clicked will generate a random link to a document.
Once inside the document, the connection to the page is upgraded to a websocket.
With the help of the websocket, the user can now share the link to their document, with friends or colleagues, and edit the document together in real-time.
This will, however, mean that anyone joining the link will be able to edit the document. To get around this, we have implemented an option to make a document private.
To make a document private, simply tick the "Private" option before clicking "Generate document" and enter a password for the document accordingly.
Now, when another user joins your private document, they will prompted to enter the password before they get to see it.
##Technologies
| Architecture | Technology |
|---|---|
| Languages | HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, GO |
| Libraries | Bootstrap, jQuery, jsPDF, tinyMCE |
| Frameworks | Macaron, Gorilla |
| Database | MongoDB |
##Design decisions
In terms of the server-side language, we used GO, both because we hadn't had any prior experience with it, and because it was required for our module.
We started the project by taking the websockets/chat exmaple from Gorilla and adapting it for our needs.
The hub.go and client.go have been barely changed at all, but our main.go logic is far from the example.
We use the Macaron framework to handle our http requests across the entire website.
Bootstrap helped us make our application look nice without reinventing the wheel, and jQuery is there to simplify our javascript.
For the database, mongodb seemed like a good decision as it was something new to learn, as well as the fact that our data didn't need any relationships.
##Using the live application
We've focused on making the UI as straight forward as possible to make the web-application easy to use.
On entering the website, the user can either create a public(non-private) document or a private one, for which a password is required.
The creator of the document is then forwarded to their the page where the document resides.
Above the text area, are all the options avaliable to the user for editing the document.
When another user tries to connect to an already created document, the code will check if it is private.
If yes, the user will be prompted to enter the password before showing the document.
A document without a password will skip the above step and take the user straight to the editor.
Users attempting to connect to a non-existant document will get a 404, Not Found error.
##Running the application for yourself Prerequisites to running the app
- GO installed and a GO workspace made
- Macaron and Gorilla packages installed
go get gopkg.in/macaron.v1 and go get github.com/gorilla/websocket
- MongoDB installed and a database called "doceditor" with a collection "documents" inside
- A browser that supports HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript along with Websockets
- Make sure port 8080 is open on your system
To run the actual code, download the entire app, extract and use the
go build
command on the extraction directory. Then simply launch the *.exe file created and open localhost:8080 in your browser.
##Features of the application
- The application will use the database to store links to documents as well as the text in them and their password
- Whenever a change to document has been made, there are 2 timers that get started. If another change is made, the time waited is reset and wait again
- One timer is responsible for when to send messages across the websocket, and the other for when to save the document to the database(minimize HTTP request)
- Websockets allowing users to edit document simultaneously
- Creation of private and public documents
- Document editing (Fonts, font sizes, font colours, alignment of text etc.)
- Save a written document in PDF format
##References