CentralCampus Group: May13-26 – William Van Walbeek & Paul Wilson Client: Google, Muthu Muthusrinivasan Advisor: Manimaran Govindarasu Abstract Introduction Iowa State University Design Requirements This concept sketch describes how CentralCampus will gather and provide data. CentralCampus will provide web scrapers to crawl data which is available on sites like Iowa State University’s web pages. It gathers information such as current professors and course offerings. Students and professors will be able to use CentralCampus as a hub to quickly find the campus information they need, and to contribute complementary information. Finally, site administrators will be in charge of ensuring that data on CentralCampus is accurate and that the website is not being abuse (as detected by an abuse reporting feature). Design Approach Concept Sketch Functional Requirements Block Diagram Google App Engine is used as a hosting service for the Web UI, Data storage, and web crawler. The crawler periodically scans the ISU website for course and professor related data and stores the information in the Datastore. When users access the site, a request is directed to an appropriate JSP. The JSP retrieves the correct information from the Datastore and the server sends the generated HTML content. Problem Statement: There is a lot of information currently available to students regarding campus life, but this information is widely dispersed and can be inconvenient to access. There is no centralized source for campus life information, and furthermore there is no existing site to comprehensively gather and provide students’ thoughts about campus life (professors, classes etc.) Solution: CentralCampus hopes to remedy this problem by providing students with a website where they can exchange information with other students and professors regarding campus life. CentralCampus is a second year project aimed at creating a social network that allows students and professors to network and share information regarding academic life. This product brings together and goes beyond existing sources of information. The goal of this project is to provide a single website which provides all of the most important information about a school, as well as a place for students and professors to interact and share knowledge. Our implementation was specifically geared towards ISU data, though this project could likely be expanded to other universities. Our team expanded the project by moving CentralCampus to the cloud, expanding upon a crawler created by a previous team, adding administration functionality, and implementing features which are critical to the success of a social networking site. Features include the ability to provide and view feedback about professors and classes, customizable student profiles, and the ability to view campus related news provided by an RSS feed. To provide all these features for our website, we planned a three iteration development schedule. In the first iteration of our development schedule we created our base website, with a fully functional crawler to gather university information hosted on Google App Engine. For the second iteration we focused on adding features such as the RSS feed, customizable student profiles, and a class/professor feedback system. For the third iteration, we implemented an admin panel and began testing. For testing, we created a JUnit test suite to ensure the integrity of our code. After extensive developer testing, we released our service to a select group of students for feedback. The system shall : Autonomously traverse publicly available information regarding the university Allow users to view and edit their personal information Allow users to provide feedback on all aspects of university life Allow administrators to maintain service and data integrity Non-Functional Requirements The system shall: Support upwards of 30,000 concurrent users Provide an attractive & easy to use front end Return requested information within 2 seconds Be modular in construction to allow the replacement of existing components Intended Users Students currently enrolled at Iowa State University who wish to access any important university information Site administrators to handle upkeep and abuse reports, as well as maintain data integrity Operating Environment The host platform needs to be: Able to run the code of every module Configured with a static IP address to ensure consistent access Technical Details Hosting Google App Engine was chosen because Google’s cloud service allows us to focus on feature development. Database Storage Google Cloud limits the database storage options to those offered by Google Cloud, thus leaving us with Google Cloud SQL or App Engine Datastore. Datastore was chosen because it allows us to store objects in an object oriented manner. Languages Due to our choice of Google App Engine, we were required to use Java, Python, or Go on the backend. Due to previous design choices, Java was the best choice for the server side of CentralCampus. Java Servlets were used to handle incoming requests and forward the requests to JSP. For the Web UI, we used HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript with JQuery. Testing Unit Testing: We created a JUnit test suite to ensure the integrity of our crawler and servlet code. This white box test suite allowed us to create a way to standardize our code and ensures that when future teams work on this project they will be able to meet the same coding standards. User Testing: We released our service to a group of students for feedback. Through a feedback service provided on CentralCampus, they provided us with input regarding usability and functionality. Screenshots Top image: A user profile page Right image: Professor feedback page