IDM-Project

##Synopsis The goal of this project is to deploy a web video generator based on a plain text specification. Users will be able to see videos randomly generated by the application.

##Motivation As part of IDM class, we had to do this project to have a better knowledge of model transformations like model-to-text or model-to-model. We started with some transformations then finaly we created the website with JHipster.

##Model transformations and resources access

All the model's tranformations are located inside the utils package of each model's project (VideoGen and PlayList).

For Playlist model to text transformations, each one owns a specific method (toPLS, toM3U, ...).

For VideoGen transformations, a specific project has been created to abstract the core API from the video technical treatments (such as conversions applier, durations and mime types grabber). We used avconv to perform such manipulations. This package has the benefit to increase project's sustainability and concerns separation.

Jhipster integration allows a customized REST API to access each entity (see FlowplayerResource):

• http://localhost:8080/static
  • /schema
    • Json access to the VideoGen instance (Not finished)
    • See VideoGenSerializer.
  • /thumbnails/{name of the sequence}.png
    • See VideoGenTransform.createThumbnails.
  • /videos/{name of the sequence}.ts
    • See VideoGenTransform.convertTo.
  • /random.{extention}
    • Where extention can be m3u8, pls or m3u, it is regenerated on demand.
    • See VideoGenTransform.toPlayList.
  • /custom.{extention}?sequence_name1=false$sequence_name2=true
    • Where extention can be m3u8, pls or m3u, it is regenerated on demand with GET params to control which sequence has to be choosen.
    • See VideoGenTransform.toCustomPlayList.
    • Explanation on the customization functionality:
      • the key of the GET param is the sequence name
      • true forces an Optional (removed by default) or an alternatives' sequence (the last encountered one takes priority)

## Parallel works

To increase my knowledge on the EMF framework, i decided to create a Eclipse plugin project to generate jhipster JSON models, which has been done quite easily but not fully finished. The project is here. The point is that I did not found a solution to perform a new project creation to generate a full jhipster stack (ecore core API is difficult to understand), which would be a great approach to EMF code generation. Maybe later !

Problems

Jhipster JSON model does not implement ENUM properties, which was a mess for this plugins project. I started to add this facility to Jhipster javascript feature model generator.

A try has been done on xtext project mavenization, which was a huge work... Especialy for travis integration. In fact, xtent generation was not a problem BUT xtext generation was a real problematic task. I try masaputa plugin to do so (see Source chapter), which was an interesting option, not sufficient at all so. Pom.xml files have the configuration commented for information purpose.

##Project requirement The whole project has been developped with the operating system Ubuntu 14.04

###Installation To be sure that the project will perfectly run on your computer, we will make you install some tools.

####Eclipse Mars To run or visualize properly our program you will need a Eclipse environment and to be more easier you should download Eclipse Mars IDE for DSL developpers because it include xtext, xtend, EMF project.

####Npm and Node.js Npm is the package manager for Node.js.

Installation command

sudo apt-get install npm nodejs

####Grunt Grunt will allow us to be more efficiant by preventing us from repeating tasks.

Installation command

npm install -g grunt-cli

####Bower Bower is a package manager for website. It will help us to manage our packages and make sure they are all up to date.

Installation command

npm install bower -g

####Avconv Avconv is a video and audio converter. It reads an arbitrary number of input "files" and writes to an arbitrary number of output "files".

Installation command

sudo apt-get install libav-tools

###Execution Before launching the project "Application.java" you have to run some commands

You need to go in the repository 'WebService'

grunt build
bower -f update

Once you have executed them, you should able to run the application by right-clicking on "src/main/java/org/istic/idm/xtext/webservice/application.java" and chose to run it as a "java application" on an Eclipse environment.

Recurrent and blocking error

A recurrent error appears regularly. This error really blocked developement. The stacktrace can be found here.

No solution were found, flushing .m2 maven repository, reinstalling eclipse and xtext... This error appears to be non-deterministic, which is weird towards project's configuration stability any time it appended. Any help would be great to finish this work, especialy towards feature model addition.

EDIT 20160120 : it seems that this is the fault of swagger (dependencie version conflict with com.google.guava).

##Sources

Serve static files on a spring controller

http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.1.x/javadoc-api/org/springframework/web/bind/annotation/RequestMapping.html#headers%28%29

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5673260/downloading-a-file-from-spring-controllers

Flowplayer for video playing in HLS

http://flash.flowplayer.org/documentation/installation/index.html

Avconv for videos manipulations, thumbnailing and conversion

https://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/avconv

### Xtext CI

http://mapasuta.sourceforge.net/maven/site/maven-emfgen-plugin/dependencies.html

https://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/documentation/350_continuous_integration.html