MAPNUS

MAPNUS aims to provide students with a One Stop Guide around NUS with better visualization and information.

• Convenient & Knowledgable
• Lightweight
• Effective & Efficient

MAPNUS is a lightweight map based application designed specifically for the National University of Singapore that empower students by facilitating a wide range of features to find locations around NUS more effective & efficiently.

Version

0.5

Technologies

MAPNUS uses a number of open source projects & technologies to work properly:

• Atom - a hackable text editor for the 21st Century
• IntelliJ IDEA - work miracles on Java and beyond
• Twitter Bootstrap - great UI boilerplate for modern web apps
• Leaflet.js - a customized leaflet map plugin
• Scala - mapnus api web service that sits as an interface between web presentation and database
• Ruby - automated script to process data into database
• Redis Database - advanced key-value store
• Apache Tomcat - server pages technologies
• Bitnami - one click application stack for easy deployment anywhere
• Microsoft Windows Azure - awesome cloud hosting platform
• jQuery
• html5

Getting Started

All services are hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure Platform.

Webfront : MAPNUS Web is hosted on 'Microsoft Windows Azure Websites' deployed from GitHub.

Service : MAPNUS API Web Service is the service backbone architecture of the system.

MAPNUS API Web Service is written in Scala and is hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure - Virtual Machines running on Apache Tomcat.

Database : MAPNUS stores and retrieves information from Redis DB and is hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure - Virtual Machines.

The services have been configured for load balancing and scalability.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver high-bandwidth content by caching contents on various servers around the world

Webfront scales up to 4 instances if the CPU metrics meets a certain threshold.

Database is configured with master & slave configuration on 2 Virtual Machines.

Sharding allows data replication across the database servers. Should any database fail at any one point, there is a secondary database to support the system.

Installation

Disclaimer: Although the following setup is configured for Microsoft Windows Azure platform deployment, however, the same configuration can also be deployed on any other server not including any Cloud Hosting platforms as they have specific configuration settings.

• Deploying Redis DB on Windows Azure - Virtual Machine

  To create a new Virtual Machine, use the 'New' menu at the bottom left of the portal, select Virtual Machine > From Gallery.

• Choose an Image

  Following which, the Virtual Machine Wizard will open, displaying a number of base Operating System options to choose from.

  Select CentOS-Based > OpenLogic distribution and click 'next' to continue.

This screen allows us to start configuring our Virtual Machine:

• Virtual Machine Name
• Tier and Size of Computing Power
• New User Name
• Authentication, either SSH Key for authentication or password.

Opting to upload SSH Key for authentication will automatically install the SSH Key onto the user account, providing the ability to connect via SSH configured with the corresponding private key

• Virtual Machine Configuration The next screen configures the cloud service
  • Define your 'Cloud Service DNS Name', <cloud_service_dns_name>.cloudapp.net
  • Region (eg. Southeast Asia)
  • Storage Account where the VHD image will be saved to
  • Availability Set configures 'N' Virtual Machines to the set for the following reasons:
    • 99.95% SLA
    • High availability
    • Load Balancing
  • Endpoints configuration to expose Redis DB ports to public

• Ready, Set, Go! Finally, the last step will validate the settings and start your virtual machine.

The following configurations can be customized for any types of application deployments.

---

Virtual Machine Provisioned & Running

• SSH into Virtual Machine

Login into the Virtual Machine

mapnus:~ localuser$ ssh [email protected]
[email protected]'s password:

Once you have successfully SSH into your Virtual Machine, run the following commands

[azureuser@redisdbsg ~]$ uname -a
Linux redisdbsg 2.6.32-431.17.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 7 23:32:49 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[azureuser@redisdbsg ~]$ echo "Hello Azure" > /dev/null
[azureuser@redisdbsg ~]$

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Installing Redis

• Install Development Tools

• First start by installing development tools sudo yum groupinstall "Development tools"
• sudo command will require you to enter a password. Enter the password you created for the user account
• Now, let's download, compile and install Redis

[azureuser@redisdbsg ~]$ sudo yum groupinstall "Development tools"
[azureuser@redisdbsg ~]$ wget http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-2.8.13.tar.gz
[azureuser@redisdbsg ~]$ tar xzf redis-2.8.13.tar.gz
[azureuser@redisdbsg ~]$ cd redis-2.8.13
[azureuser@redisdbsg redis-2.8.13]$ make
[azureuser@redisdbsg redis-2.8.13]$ sudo make install

• Run Redis Database with Configuration file

[azureuser@redisdbsg]$ sudo /usr/local/bin/redis-server redisconf/redisdb.conf

You're all set! Redis database is now accessible to the world, run a test to make sure your configurations are working.

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Installing Apache Tomcat

(For Advanced Users)

Disclaimer: Any attempt to modify or change any settings could potentially cause failure(s) and(or) service disruption(s) to Apache Tomcat Servers' execution.

Unless you are fully aware of the implications of the modification, the following settings should be handled with due care.

Apache Tomcat on Windows Azure is a customized stack provided by Bitnami. Using the same procedure, create a new Virtual Machine for hosting Tomcat.

Bitnami stack comes with Apache Tomcat pre-installed into the Virtual Machine. There are lesser installations to be done here.

In this example, we will use bitnami-tomcat

Remember to configure your endpoints to expose Tomcat's port to be accesible by public

• SSH into Virtual Machine

Login into Virtual Machine

mapnus:~ localuser$ ssh [email protected]
[email protected]'s password:

Once you have logged in, you will see the following screen, let's setup our Tomcat server.

Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-32-generic x86_64)
       ___ _ _                   _
      | _ |_) |_ _ _  __ _ _ __ (_)
      | _ \ |  _| ' \/ _` | '  \| |
      |___/_|\__|_|_|\__,_|_|_|_|_|

  *** Welcome to the Bitnami Tomcat 7.0.55-0        ***
  *** Bitnami Wiki:   http://wiki.bitnami.com/      ***
  *** Bitnami Forums: http://community.bitnami.com/ ***
[azureuser@bitnami-tomcat]$ cd stack/apache-tomcat/conf
azureuser@bitnami-tomcat:~/stack/apache-tomcat/conf$

• Configure the ports that would be mapped to Endpoints to be exposed

• Uncomment the following line to enable Tomcat Server port to be accessible on the web
• Save and quit nano
• Go to Windows Azure Portal and map the port as the following

Name: Tomcat

Protocol: TCP

Public Port: 80

Private Port: 8080

azureuser@bitnami-tomcat:~/stack/apache-tomcat/conf$ sudo nano server.xml
<!-- A "Connector" represents an endpoint by which requests are received
         and responses are returned. Documentation at :
         Java HTTP Connector: /docs/config/http.html (blocking & non-blocking)
         Java AJP  Connector: /docs/config/ajp.html
         APR (HTTP/AJP) Connector: /docs/apr.html
         Define a non-SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080
    -->

    <Connector port="8080" URIEncoding="UTF-8" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"/>
azureuser@bitnami-tomcat:~/stack/apache-tomcat/conf$

• Change the default username & password for security reasons

azureuser@bitnami-tomcat:~/stack/apache-tomcat/conf$ sudo nano tomcat-users.xml
<user username="azureuser" password="my_very_secure_password" roles="manager-gui,admin-gui"/>
</tomcat-users>
azureuser@bitnami-tomcat:~/stack/apache-tomcat/conf$

• Ensure that Tomcat Server is running

• sudo ./ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) apache
• sudo ./ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) mysql
• sudo ./ctlscript.sh (start|stop|restart|status) tomcat

• To stop all running services sudo ./ctlscript.sh stop

azureuser@bitnami-tomcat:~/stack$ sudo ./ctlscript.sh start tomcat
tomcat already running
azureuser@bitnami-tomcat:~/stack$

• Let's deploy our Scala war file.

• Upload WAR file to the Virtual Machine
• Open your web browser to http://bitnami-tomcat.cloudapp.net/manager/html
• Enter your Tomcat Credentials you set earlier
• Select Deploy directory or WAR file located on server
  • Configure the following settings and set the path to root '/'

Context Path (required): /

XML Configuration file or URL: (omit if irrelevant)

WAR or Directory URL: /home/bitnami/<your_war_filename>.war

'if file has been uploaded to the Virtual Machine file directory'

Once it's deployed, you can validate it by accessing it from the public url

You're all set! Apache Tomcat is now accessible to the world!

Open your web browser to http://bitnami-tomcat.cloudapp.net to test if it's running!

Compiling Scala Project

• Package Scala project into WAR file
• Change to your project directory
• WAR file is located in your project directory under 'target/scala-X.XX'

mapnus:~ localuser$ cd TomcatApp
mapnus:TomcatApp localuser$
mapnus:TomcatApp localuser$ sbt clean compile
mapnus:TomcatApp localuser$ sbt package
mapnus:TomcatApp localuser$ cd target/scala-2.10
mapnus:scala-2.10 localuser$

Running our Ruby Automated Scripts

• automate_db.rb : runs text data, crunch the data and push to database
• Change to our Ruby DB directory
• Run the following command and output our results to json.out file

mapnus:~ localuser$ cd db
mapnus:db localuser$ ruby automated_db.rb > json.out

License

MIT.

Copyright (c) 2014 Kenneth Ham & Jireh Tan.