Thredd

About

Thredd is a minimalistic web app that stores and displays articles and their comment sections. Articles consist of a title and body. Comment sections consist of comments and their nested replies. Replies can be nested ad infinitum! Check it out on heroku here.

For the good times, press cmd + enter when entering a comment to post it quickly!

Running Locally

• Thredd uses MongoDB as a datastore, so you will need to run a mongod.
• Thredd makes use of some environment variables as configuration. Run source config.sh to load the necessary variables into your shell.
• make tests run the tests.
• make astroturf seed the database with a randomly generated article and its randomly generated comment section. (repeat as necessary for more articles).
• make server start the server and navigate to the index page.

Code overview

Thredd is implemented with some fun tech. The server is built with Koa and the UI is built with React. Articles and comment sections are rendered server-side for speed.

The entrypoint for the server is node_modules/server/index. Data modeling and persistence is handled by the services found in node_modules/services. There are indexes set on the user and article properties of comments for faster querying. Indexes are declared when the Mongo collections are loaded into the app, i.e., node_modules/services/collections/index. The web views are found in node_modules/views.

The entrypoint for the client is node_modules/article-comments/main. The front-end app favors a functional reactive style. Code is organized into a store for data management and a view that rerenders when the store signals an update.

less is used as the CSS compiler. The JavaScript and CSS are built for distribution by running make dist.

Most key business logic is implemented by functions. For example, the code that computes the thread structure of comment sections operates on an array of comments and returns an array of the top level comments (see node_modules/transforms/index).

TODOS

• Astroturf
• Store/View
• Post
• Reply
• View user comments
• View articles
• Comment timestamps/hash fragments
• moar tests
• Add License
• Production Build
• Comment.thread naming
• render views more efficiently
• user error message
• logging
• User comments are rendered in the wrong time zone (fixed by UI change)
• Optimistic post
• Animations
• User login/logout
• pretty URLs
• Stream
• Markdown support
• browser tests
• Commit Monk changes
• Debug tap & monk db.close()
• Debug tap & node --harmony