This project was started as a part of our CS-433 Computer Networks course at IIT Gandhinagar, and was colaboratively made by Dishank Goel, Harshit Kumar and Pushkar Mujumdar
- Problem Statement ❗
- Directory Structure 📁
- Feature Checklist ✅
- Use Cases 🕹️
- Communication Paradigm for web application 🛰️
- Communication paradigm for Live Classroom Feature 🛰️
- App Logic 🚲
- Overview of Implementation ⚙️
- How To Use 🛠️
- Deployment Strategy 🧠
- Screenshots 📷
Design and implement Mini Classroom, a simple internet tool that mimics the functionalities of Google Classroom and some additional features. Build your application on top of TCP.
Mini-Classroom
├── api.py
├── app.py
├── chat_client.py
├── chat_server.py
├── database
│ └── make_database.py
├── http_lib.py
├── mininet_tests.py
├── models.py
├── README.md
├── requirements.txt
├── server.py
├── server_to_app.py
├── start_app.sh
├── start_chat_app.sh
└── static
├── attendance.html
├── class.html
├── classrooms.html
├── create_class.html
├── css
│ ├── chat.css
│ ├── cover.css
│ ├── offcanvas.css
│ └── signin.css
├── discussion.html
├── error.html
├── group_discussions.html
├── img
│ ├── class_icon.png
│ └── login_icon.png
├── index.html
├── join_class.html
├── js
│ └── offconvas.js
├── live_class.html
├── login.html
├── posts_by_tag.html
├── signup.html
└── students.html
Basic Features -
✅ Any Client is able to sign up and create an account with Mini Classroom
✅ Client can Login and Logout
✅ Client can create a classroom and be the instructor of the class
✅ Client can join a classroom as a student by using the classroom code
✅ Only the Instructor can post updates to the classroom
✅ Students (and the instructor) can view posts on the classroom
Advance Features -
✅ Instructor can associate a Tag with each post
✅ Students and the Instructor can view posts Categorized by Tags
✅ Instructor can initiate a Live Classroom Session
✅ Students and Instructor can join and send messages in the Live Classroom Session
✅ Instructor can initiate a Group Discussion on any topic
✅ Students and Instructor can send public messages in the Group Discussion
✅ Students can send private messages only to the Instructor
✅ Instructor can send private messages to any student
✅ Concurrent server which can handle several client requests
✅ Multiple instances of server
Security Features 🔒-
✅ Users need to Authenticate (Login) with the server before accessing any features
✅ When a client enters a password, the input is masked
✅ Only the Instructor can access all the students in a classroom
Bonus Features -
✅ Attendance Management: Instructors can access Attendance of any Live Classroom session
✅ Group Chat with Students
✅ Browser based GUI for all features except Live Chat and Group Chat
✅ Live Chat and Group Chat are command line based features
A client in a particular Classroom can have one of the two roles -
- Instructor
- Student
- We have Implemented HTTP protocol on top of TCP
- Request 🔃 Response paradigm.
- Client establishes connection with the server.
- Client sends request to the server as URL and request method.
- HTTP parser parses the headers of the HTTP request and makes use of the following headers -
- First line: Method (GET/POST), URL, Protocol (HTTP/version)
- Content length: Length of the body of the request in bytes
- Content type: Type of content in the body.
- Set cookie: To give the client a token for authorization and usage for further communication
- Cookie: To store the authorization token
- Location: To redirect the client to a new route
- HTTP library sends the following headers in the HTTP response -
- First line: Version, Response Code
- Server: Name of the server (Custom server in our case)
- Content type: Specifies the type of the content in the body.
- Content length: Length of the content in the body
- Connection: Used to specify if connection is persistent/non-persistent. In our case, Connection = close in the response as we are keeping it non-persistent.
- Response Codes sent by server include:
- 200 - OK (Request is OK, render HTML)
- 302 - Moved Permanently (used for redirect)
- 404 - Not Found (error response)
- 405 - Method Not Acceptable (error response)
- Full duplex bidirectional communication.
- The size of the JSON object is sent first, followed by the JSON object itself.
- Whenever a client sends a message, the live-class server receives it and broadcasts it to all clients.
Below is the High Level Design of the App
-
Make sure that all the dependencies are installed by running.
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt -
First, the database needs to be created. Make sure you have mysql installed and the sql server is up and running. Go into the database/ directory. Run:
$ python3 make_database.py <IP of database> <user> <password>
In case of running database server onlocalhost, the IP will be127.0.0.1and user and password as per configuration -
Deploy app server: This server is the main backend for the application. To deploy this, run
$ ./start_app.sh <ip_of_server>
Note: Edit ./start_app.sh for database configurations if the database is not on localhost. -
Deploy chat server: This server handles the live chatting and group chatting. It has a different network paradigm than app server. To deploy this, run
$ ./start_chat_app.sh <ip_of_server>
Note: Edit ./start_chat_app.sh for database configurations if the database is not on localhost. -
The application is now ready to use.
Intended deployment strategy is a simple tree topology, with all the clients at leaf nodes, database server connected to switch s7 at depth-0, 2 app servers and 1 chat server connected to switches at depth-1.
