Assignment 2
Due No due date Points 100 Submitting a file upload File types pdf
Start Assignment
Handin Dates
25th of August at 5:00 pm - Submit a design sketch
(https://myuni.adelaide.edu.au/courses/85272/assignments/344547) via Canvas (PDF)
16th of September at 5:00 pm - Submit draft revision 1 of your assignment 2. No grace period
allowed.
6th of October at 5:00 pm - Submit the final version of your assignment 2. No grace period
allowed.
Design Sketch
The design sketch is a rough architecture of your system for us to be able to provide feedback on
early. You may want to consider use cases of your system and the flow of information through it in
the sketch, or simply the components you have thought of and where they sit in the system.
Hints:
Functional analysis is good
A component view (even if it's extremely coarse: clients, aggregation server, content servers) is
required
Multi-threaded interactions are a good place to focus some design effort. Show how you ensure
that your thread interactions are safe (no races or unsafe mutations) and live (no deadlocks).
Explain how many server replicas you need and why
UML is a good way of expressing software designs, but it is not mandated.
It would be useful to know how you will test each part
Diagrams are awesome
Note: Assignments with no design file will receive a mark of zero.
Preview
We strongly advise that you submit a draft revision/preview of your completed assignment 2 so that
we can provide you with feedback.
You will receive feedback within 1 week. The feedback will be detailed but carries no marks. You are
given the opportunity to revise and change your work based on the feedback for the final submission
so you use it while you can.
Final revision
If you received feedback in the last submission, please add a PDF (Changes.pdf) in your final
version of submission that includes a discussion of the feedback received and what changes you
decided to make and why.
Using Version Control
Working in your repository
As you work on your code you will be adding and committing files to your repository. Git
documentation explains and has examples on performing these actions.
It is strongly advised that you:
Commit regularly
Use meaningful commit messages
Develop your tests incrementally
Assignment Submission
You are allowed to commit as many times as you like.
On submission there will be not assigned marks.
Keep an eye on the forums for announcements regarding marks.
Assignment Description
Objective
To gain an understanding of what is required to build a client/server system, you are to use Java
RMI to build a system that aggregates and distributes weather data in JSON format using a RESTful
API.
Introduction
A RESTful API is an interface that computer systems use to exchange information securely over the
Internet. Most business applications have to communicate with other internal and third-party
applications to perform various tasks. A RESTful APIs support this information exchange because
they follow secure, reliable, and efficient software communication standards.
The application programming interface (API) defines the rules that you must follow to communicate
with other software systems. Developers expose or create APIs so that other applications can
communicate with their applications programmatically. Representational State Transfer (REST) is a
software architecture that imposes conditions on how an API should work. REST was initially
created as a guideline to manage communication on a complex network like the internet. You can
use REST-based architecture to support high-performing and reliable communication at scale.
Two important principles of the REST architectural style are:
Uniform interface: it indicates that the server transfers information in a standard format. The
formatted resource is called a representation in REST. This format can be different from the
internal representation of the resource on the server application. In this assignment, the format
used is the JSON standard.
Statelessness: refers to a communication method in which the server completes every client
request independently of all previous requests. Clients can request resources in any order, and
every request is stateless or isolated from other requests.
The basic function of a RESTful API is the same as browsing the internet. The client contacts the
server by using the API when it requires a resource. API developers explain how the client should
use the REST API in the server application API documentation.
JSON standard
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that
uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and
arrays (or other serializable values). It is a common data format with diverse uses in electronic data
interchange, including that of web applications with servers.
The following example shows a possible JSON representation describing current weather
information.
{
"id" : "IDS60901",
"name" : "Adelaide (West Terrace / ngayirdapira)",
"state" : "SA",
"time_zone" : "CST",
"lat": -34.9,
"lon": 138.6,
"local_date_time": "15/04:00pm",
"local_date_time_full": "20230715160000",
"air_temp": 13.3,
"apparent_t": 9.5,
"cloud": "Partly cloudy",
"dewpt": 5.7,
"press": 1023.9,
"rel_hum": 60,
"wind_dir": "S",
"wind_spd_kmh": 15,
"wind_spd_kt": 8
}
The server, once configured, will serve out this JSON formatted file to any client that requests it over
HTTP. Usually, this would be part of a web-client but, in this case, you will be writing the aggregation
server, the content servers and the read clients. The content server will PUT content on the server,
while the read client will GET content from the server.
Elements
The main elements of this assignment are:
An aggregation server that responds to client requests for weather data and also accepts new
weather updates from content servers. The aggregation server will store weather information
persistently, only removing it when the content server who provided it is no longer in contact, or
when the weather data is too old (e.g. not one of the most recent 20 updates).
A client that makes an HTTP GET request to the server and then displays the weather data.
A content server that makes an HTTP PUT request to the server and then uploads new weather
data to the server, replacing the old one. This information is assembled into JSON after being
read from a file on the content server's local filesystem.
All code elements will be written in the Java programming language. Your clients are expected to
have a thorough failure handling mechanism where they behave predictably in the face of failure,
maintain consistency, are not prone to race conditions and recover reliably and predictably.
Summary of this assignment
In this assignment, you will build the aggregation system described below, including a failure
management system to deal with as many of the possible failure modes that you can think of for this
problem. This obviously includes client, server and network failure, but now you must deal with the
following additional constraints (come back to these constraints after you read the description
below):
1. Multiple clients may attempt to GET simultaneously and are required to GET the aggregated feed
that is correct for the Lamport clock adjusted time if interleaved with any PUTs. Hence, if A PUT,
a GET, and another PUT arrive in that sequence then the first PUT must be applied and the
content server advised, then the GET returns the updated feed to the client then the next PUT is
applied. In each case, the participants will be guaranteed that this order is maintained if they are
using Lamport clocks.
2. Multiple content servers may attempt to simultaneously PUT. This must be serialised and the
order maintained by Lamport clock timestamp.
3. Your aggregation server will expire and remove any content from a content server that it has not
communicated within the last 30 seconds. You may choose the mechanism for this but you must
consider efficiency and scale.
4. All elements in your assignment must be capable of implementing Lamport clocks, for
synchronization and coordination purposes.
Your Aggregation Server
To keep things simple, we will assume that there is one file in your filesystem which contains a list of
entries and where are they come from. It does not need to be an JSON format specifically, but it
must be able to convert to a standard JSON file when the client sends a GET request. However, this
file must survive the server crashing and re-starting, including recovering if the file was being
updated when the server crashed! Your server should restore it as was before re-starting or a crash.
You should, therefore, be thinking about the PUT as a request to handle the information passed in,
possibly to an intermediate storage format, rather than just as overwriting a file. This reflects the
subtle nature of PUT - it is not just a file write request! You should check the feed file provided from a
PUT request to ensure that it is valid. The file details that you can expect are detailed in the Content
Server specification.
All the entities in your system must be capable of maintaining a Lamport clock.
The first time weather data is received and the storage file is created, you should return status 201 -
HTTP_CREATED. If later uploads (updates) are successful, you should return status 200. (This
means, if a Content Server first connects to the Aggregation Server, then return 201 as succeed
code, then before the content server lost connection, all other succeed response should use 200).
Any request other than GET or PUT should return status 400 (note: this is not standard but to
simplify your task). Sending no content to the server should cause a 204 status code to be returned.
Finally, if the JSON data does not make sense (incorrect JSON) you may return status code 500 -
Internal server error.
Your server will, by default, start on port 4567 but will accept a single command line argument that
gives the starting port number. Your server's main method will reside in a file called
AggregationServer.java .
Your server is designed to stay current and will remove any items in the JSON that have come from
content servers which it has not communicated with for 30 seconds. How you do this is up to you but
please be efficient!
Your GET client
Your GET client will start up, read the command line to find the server name and port number (in
URL format) and will send a GET request for the weather data. This data will then be stripped of
JSON formatting and displayed, one line at a time, with the attribute and its value. Your GET client's
main method will reside in a file called GETClient.java . Possible formats for the server name and
port number include "http://servername.domain.domain:portnumber",
"http://servername:portnumber" (with implicit domain information) and "servername:portnumber"
(with implicit domain and protocol information).
You should display the output so that it is easy to read but you do not need to provide active
hyperlinks. You should also make this client failure-tolerant and, obviously, you will have to make
your client capable of maintaining a Lamport clock.
Your Content Server
Your content server will start up, reading two parameters from the command line, where the first is
the server name and port number (as for GET) and the second is the location of a file in the file
system local to the Content Server (It is expected that this file located in your project folder). The file
will contain a number of fields that are to be assembled into JSON format and then uploaded to the
server. You may assume that all fields are text and that there will be no embedded HTML or XHMTL.
The list of JSON elements that you need to support are shown in the example above.
Input file format
To make parsing easier, you may assume that input files will follow this format:
id:IDS60901
name:Adelaide (West Terrace / ngayirdapira)
state" : "SA",
time_zone:CST
lat":-34.9
lon":138.6
local_date_time:15/04:00pm
local_date_time_full:20230715160000
air_temp:13.3
apparent_t:9.5
cloud:Partly cloudy
dewpt:5.7
press:1023.9
rel_hum:60
wind_dir:S
wind_spd_kmh:15
wind_spd_kt:8
An entry is terminated by either another entry keyword, or by the end of file, which also terminates
the feed. You may reject any feed or entry with no title, link or id as being in error. You may ignore
any markup in a text field and just print it as is.
PUT message format
Your PUT message should take the format:
PUT /weather.json HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: ATOMClient/1/0
Content-Type: (You should work this one out)
Content-Length: (And this one too)
{
"id" : "IDS60901",
...
(data)
...
"wind_spd_kt": 8
}
Your content server will need to confirm that it has received the correct acknowledgment from the
server and then check to make sure that the information is in the feed as it was expecting. It must
also support Lamport clocks.
Some basic suggestions
The following would be a good approach to solving this problem:
Think about how you will test this and how you are going to build each piece. What are the
individual steps?
Write a simple version of your servers and client to make sure that you can communicate
between them.
Use smaller JSON data for testing parts of your system and read all of the relevant spec sections
carefully!
There are many default Java JSON parsers out there, learn how to use them rather than write
your own. Both options are acceptable, but we have found that it does save time to use existing
ones (if not for anything, you have a ton of tutorials out there!)
We strongly recommend that you implement this assignment using Sockets rather than
HttpServer
Try modularising your code; for example, JSON parser functions are required in all places, so it
is better to have all those functions in one class, then reused in other places.
Notes on Lamport Clocks
Please note that you will have to implement Lamport clocks and the update mechanisms in your
entire system. This implies that each entity will keep a local Lamport clock and that this clock will get
updated as the entity communicates with other entities or processes events. It is up to you to
determine which events (such as send, receive or processing) the entity will consider in the Lamport
clock update (for example, a System.out.println might not be interesting). This granularity will
influence the performance of your implementation. The local Lamport clocks will need to be sent
through to other entities with every message/request (like in the request header) - you are
responsible for ensuring that this tagging occurs and for the local update of Lamport clocks once
messages/requests are received. Towards this, follow the algorithm discussed in class and/or in the
Lamport clocks paper accessible from the forum. As part of this requirement, we are aware that your
method for embedding Lamport clock information in your communications may mean that you lose
interoperability with other clients and servers. This is an acceptable outcome for this assignment but,
usually, we would take a standards-based approach to ensure that we maintain interoperability.
And lastly,
START EARLY!
Don't get caught out at the last minute trying to do the entire assignment at once - it is easy to
misjudge the complexity and hours required for this assignment.
Contact the course coordinator, lectures or tutors if you need help getting started.
You are encouraged to post questions on the forums.
Assessment
The allocation of marks for this assignment is as follows:
60% - Software solution
40% - Automated testing
The assessment of your software solution will be allocated as follows:
10% - Code quality, following the checklist in Appendix A (below)
20% - Architecture design decisions
30% - Support for basic functionality, following the checklist in Appendix B (below)
40% - Support for full functionality and quality of design, following the checklist in Appendix B
(below)
The assessment of your testing will be allocated as follows:
The range of test cases considered
rather than focus on the number of tests, are you identifying the most important test cases with a
good spread across possible cases?
The clarity of your test cases
your test harness should be verbose enough to ensure that we understand both what you have
tested and the outcome of the tests
Your testing architecture, ideally captured in a testing document should become an important part of
your development process!
Final Words
Don't forget to commit your work frequently and to submit before the due date!
Appendix A
Code Quality Checklist
Do
Write comments above the header of each of your methods, describing what the method is
doing, what are the inputs and expected outputs
describe in the comments any special cases
create modular code, following cohesion and coupling principles
Don't
use magic numbers
use comments as structural elements
mis-spell your comments
use incomprehensible variable names
have methods longer than 80 lines
allow TODO blocks
Appendix B
Assignment 2 Checklist
Basic functionality refers to:
Text sending works - please send text strings instead of fully formatted JSON (see below for
bonus)
client, Atom server and content server processes start up and communicate
PUT operation works for one content server
GET operation works for many read clients
Aggregation server expunging expired data works (30s)
Retry on errors (server not available etc) works
Full functionality refers to:
Lamport clocks are implemented
All error codes are implemented
Content servers are replicated and fault tolerant
Bonus functionality (10 points):
JSON parsing works --> remember that using an existing parser is more than ok!