ohmage API server

ohmage is a mobile data collection system for collecting data given explicitly by a user (active data) and data that is collected by backgrounded applications (passive data). This repository houses the server-side application. The Android application can be found at here.

A description of the high-level entities can be found at here, and an introduction into how to read and write from an up-and-running system can be found here.

The API docs for the server can be found here

Setup

For web application veterans, all that is needed is a MySQL database and a servlet container.

The default ohmage technology stack runs on various Linux distros and requires:

• Java 7
• MariaDB 5.5 or MySQL 5.5
• Tomcat 7.0.28 or later.

For internal hosting and development, the ohmage team uses nginx 1.9 for serving up static content and better SSL performance.

Setting Up the Database

ohmage depends on a MySQL instance. To set the database configuration, create an /etc/ohmage.conf file with the following parameters (fill in host,port,db name, user and password as needed, the defaults are shown):

db.driver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
db.jdbcurl=jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1:3306/ohmage?characterEncoding=utf8
db.username=ohmage
db.password=&!sickly

Please see the db/migrations dir for more information on schema creation and migrating the database.

To note, after running the migrations and seeding, the default admin user to use is ohmage.admin/ohmage.passwd. You'll be forced to reset this password on first log in.

Setting Up the Directory Structure

ohmage depends on a set of directories to store log files and user data. By default, these are located at /var/lib/ohmage/. This directory should contain a number of subdirectories, called audits, audio, images, documents and videos. These directories can be changed through the preference table in the database. The log directory (default: /var/log/ohmage) will create itself.

Setting Up the Servlet Container

Any Servlet 3.0 compliant container should work. Internally, we use Tomcat. To build the WAR file, use ant clean dist, which will produce an ssl-disabled container. It should be noted that we do not recommend having the servlet itself handle SSL, and instead suggest you use a web server like nginx or apache to do SSL termination.

Collaboration

The coding rules are loose, and the best reference would be other parts of the code. A few rules we do have are:

• 4 space indents (no tabs).
• Always use curly braces even if the conditional or loop is one line.
• Opening curly braces go on the same line of the loop or conditional declaration.
• All comments must be no more than 79 characters (with the 80th character being a new line). Code should try to adhere to this as best as possible.