Palapala is an collaborative whiteboard browser app powered by Paper.js and ShareDB. It has a drawing tool set geared towards mathematics instruction. In particular it has tools for placing third-party graphing calculator apps onto the canvas, manipulating them collaboratively, and drawing freehand over the inserted graph.
This project was started because I needed a live whiteboard tool for distance learning use during the COVID-19 pandemic and could not locate a suitable Free Software solution.
Install using npm like any Node.js package.
$ git clone [...]
$ cd palapala
$ npm install .
$ npm run build
$ npm dist
Environment variable MONGO_URL should eb a url to a mongo database.
The start script runs nodemon js/server.js and starts listening on environment variable PORT || 8000.
$ MONGO_URL="[...secret...]" npm start
Once the server is running direct a browser to localhost:8000 (or whatever the server machine's address is). You will be redirected to a randomly generated document id /:id/
- Authentication.
- This is partially implemented and uses a session id to recognize a document owner.
- List/tree of user's documents.
- Multi-page whiteboards
- SVG export