R-Shief Web App

This web app serves the:

• R-Shief Dashboard
• The Good Glitch Bibliography Visualization

You can use the Dockerfile in this repo for your own service builds if you so please, but before anything will work, you will need to place a secrets.js file in the config/ directory with the following information:

module.exports = {
  dbSecrets: {
    host: "rshief.mysql.db.ip",
    port: "dbport",
    user: "dbuser",
    password: "dbpassword",
    database: "rshiefschema"
  },
  sessionSecrets: {
    secret: "some long keyphrase with which cookies will be encrypted"
  }
}

This documentation also assumes that a mysql 8.0 database with the R-Shief schema and subroutines is available over the internet.

For Developers

To spin the server up for development, cd into the root of this repo, make sure all dependencies are installed with npm i and run npm run-script start:dev. This will make the node server automatically restart the server and re-compile the source code when changes are detected.

You should now be able to find the dashboard at localhost:3000/dashboard and the bibliography visualization at localhost:3000/bibviz.

Tour

The backend is a node server using the ExpressJS framework for routing and middleware. Look in app.js or dashboardRouter.js to find the majority of the backend processing.

The function res.render will look in the views folder for a pug template file, which is basically HTML, but with python-esque whitespace delimiting instead of closing tags. The dashboard and bibviz template files will include a 'bundle' javascript located in public/javascripts. These are the compiled scripts, and are not meant to be edited. To make changes, spin the server up in dev mode (npm run-script start:dev) and edit the source files in the src folder. They will automatically be re-compiled, minified, transpiled, and bundled by Webpack (and Babel).

The Bibliography Visualization uses THREE.js for WEBGL rendering.

The Dashboard frontend is done in a React style, with Bootstrap styling (unfortunately I hadn't adopted React early enough to decide on Reactstrap).

Everything is written in plain old Javascript, but I do make use of ES6 syntax (classes, promises). Webpack/Babel take care of the compatibility concerns there.