CSRS Membership Web Site

This is the code for a membership database that I am working on for the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies.

It was originally a JHipster app -- that is, using Spring at the back end and Angular.js at the front end. However, I did not stick with the JHipster workflow very long -- just used it as a starting point (for which it was very useful indeed).

Then, I became aware of the Elm programming language, which is a functional programming language that compiles to Javascript for the front-end. In order to learn Elm, I decided to try porting the application to Elm -- I figured I would abandon the effort when it became clear that Elm couldn't handle what I wanted to do. So far, that hasn't happened ...

Points of Interest

Elm

As far as points of interest go, there are a variety of things on the Elm side that could be of interest to Elm programmers -- see src/main/elm for the code.

Java

For the Java side, some of the stuff that I'm doing with Specifications could be interesting -- see src/main/java/com/fulliautomatix/csrs/specification for the source. Essentially, I'm using specifications and their JSON representations as a method to transmit queries from the client to the server. This is an area that doesn't really have an obvious solution, though of course there are a variety of alternatives.

Building the App

This app is quite project-specific, but I thought it would be nice to make it buildable by others in case they wanted to play with it (especially the Elm code). So, here is a step-by-step guide:

• Clone the repository from Github: e.g.

  git clone https://github.com/rgrempel/csrs-elm.git

• Create Postgresql databases and users for the app to use: e.g.

  createuser csrs
  createdb -O csrs csrs-dev
  createdb -O csrs csrs-test
  

• We use the Postgresql 'unaccent' extension, which needs to be installed by the superuser. So, you need to do that manually ... e.g.

  psql -d csrs-dev -c "CREATE EXTENSION unaccent"
  psql -d csrs-test -c "CREATE EXTENSION unaccent"
  

• Take a look at src/main/resources/config and src/test/resources/config. Copy the *.template files to .yml files, and customize the settings to fit your database settings and other settings.

• You'll need to install the node package manager. Then, use it to install some dependencies:

  npm install

• You will need to install Elm. Then, install our Elm dependencies:

  elm-package install

• All having gone well, you should now be able to run the tests successfully, e.g.

  ./gradlew test

• At this point, you should have a fairly normal Spring Boot / Gradle setup. So, for instance, to run the app in-place, you can do the usual:

  ./gradlew bootRun

• There are two accounts pre-set: username "admin", password "admin"; and username "user", password "user". Of course, you'll want to change those passwords if you're going to expose the app ...