Update 2 - Community Bonding Period

by Pubudu Dodangoda 10:42 PM 3 comments

This post briefly explains about my progress towards the GSoC project following up with my progress update 1. I did a lot of experiment work and research during this time giving attention to the JBrowse code base, sailsJs, different comment platforms angularjs and nodejs.

 I followed up a tutorial published by thinkster.io to have a better understanding of the MEAN Stack since I thought that this knowledge would be useful when designing a component that works in both the backend and frontend. The tutorial can be found at https://thinkster.io/mean-stack-tutorial. I created a complete application as instructed using AngularJS, NodeJs, ExpressJs and MongoDB. To learn more about AngularJs, I followed all the topics given by W3Schools at http://www.w3schools.com/angular/default.asp. Then I jumped into another interactive tutorial from the book, AngularJs in Action. I followed about half of the book content.

Then I started learning a bit of sailsJs. I followed the get-started pack at http://sailsjs.org/get-started and currently following the tutorial at https://scotch.io/tutorials/build-a-todo-app-using-sailsjs-and-angularjs.

I also did some research about different comment platforms and found Facebook Comments and Disqus comments to be the best so far with respect to the project requirement. First I tried to add the comment option to a custom application built with expressJs. For facebook comments, I connected the FacebookApp I created earlier as the host and did the integration. For disqus, I created an account on their system and connected the disqus comment box using that account. A summary of comments and configurations can be viewed via these admin panels.

We can configure different URLs to identify different comment threads. Also, these two systems host the comments in their servers. Therefore we do not need a separate backend to store comments. We can use a backend for other custom configurations.

On being success at integrating it to a custom application, I tried to integrate it to JBrowse itself. First I did it in the localhost using the apache server as the host for JBrowse. Then I thought of hosting it public on the web. My plan was to host it on my Final Year Research Project Server given to me by my university. However, there were issues when installing JBrowse on the virtual machine.

To overcome that, I created a new repo of JBrowse with the pre-configurations done using bower and setup.sh. https://github.com/pupudu/unpacked-jbrowse. Then I cloned the repo from my virtual machine and used an expressJs application to host the JBrowse. Now it is live with the disqus comment feature at http://sid.projects.mrt.ac.lk:3000/?data=sample_data/json/volvox
A lot of css styling and design planing will be required before the final system is released.