CloudWrite

This Spring-based application provides authors with a collaborative environment from which to plan research and educational (fundamental) articles.

Commits from this point onwards use JAXB2 to generate DTO classes needed to run CloudWrite; see the XSD files. These classes will be flagged as missing within an IDE. To proceed, run package from maven (or within an IDE) to generate the DTO classes (the generated classes will be saved in the /target/generated-sources/jaxb directory).

The packaged jar file is included here for demonstration purposes.

Running CloudRead (client) with CloudWrite (service)

CloudRead is a REST client for CloudWrite and grants all users read-only access to the article plans. It consumes and maps XML to Java objects and (i) presents them in a browser or (ii) can export articles as DOCX files.

Download copies of the JAR directories and subdirectories present for both CloudRead and CloudWrite. Run both JARs in separate terminals as outlined in their respective READMEs. Then access localhost port 5000 for CloudWrite or localhost port 8080 for CloudRead.

The admin user (edit articles and add/remove/edit user accounts) is 'admin', with the imaginative password 'admin123'. Non-admin users who can only edit articles can be accessed with the username 'user' and password 'user123'.

Docker image

The image can be pulled from Docker Hub here. The same login details mentioned above also apply.

To build a CloudWrite Docker image, follow the guidelines here. To build a CloudRead image and then run both as networked containers, go here).

Research themed articles

The model is broken down into entities, as follows:

Article type: research article
Article standfirst/headline
- Reasons/rationale for research
- How above aspect(s) is/are approached
Literature survey(s)
- Purpose of research
- Current efforts and contributions
- Key results (these can be listed by priority)
- Future work
Citations (literature references)

Fundamental based articles

The model is broken down into entities, as follows:

Article type: fundamentals
Prerequisite knowledge
Subtopic
- General justification/purpose/problem area
- Concept(s)
- Summary/future outlook

Spring Web App features

Currently features available:

Spring security authentication (admin in place to add/remove/edit user accounts; all users can edit all articles)
H2 in-memory and MySQL persistence
Thymeleaf and Bootstrap templating
REST API (JSON and XML), with OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) documentation

RESTful API

Access to the RESTapi is provided by OpenAPI (formerly Swagger), at http://localhost:5000/swagger-ui.html. The port number by default is 8080 but was changed to 5000 in preparation for potential AWS deployment. The port number can be changed in application.properties.

XML schema files (XSD) were initially generated from XML GET requests and converted with online XSD generators, FreeFormatter, to XSD formats before manual refinement. The XSD files can be used by other frameworks and languages to generate classes which align with CloudWrite's classes and allow other REST clients to consume XML returns from CloudWrite.

The conversion of Java object data to XML is referred to as 'marshalling'. The conversion of XML data to Java object data employed by REST clients is referred to as 'un-marshalling'.

MySQL persistence

Data can be saved to a MySQL database by triggering the 'SQL' annotation in application.properties. The SQL scripts for the user account and tables are provided in the SQLscript directory. Changes to the MySQL user account must match those provided in the application-SQL.yml file.

Currently, the JAR build and Docker image are prepared for demo purposes and utilise the in-memory H2 database.

jfspps/CloudWrite