Welcome To Caw & Faz!

About the project

Faz

Faz is a Function as a Service (FaaS) platform. It performs basic hooking and unhooking of functions and, of course, lets you run your custom function! You can read more about FaaS here.

Caw

Caw is a social networking platform built on top of Faz. Caw has basic functionality that resembles that of Twitter!

Getting set up!

Setting up the VM

For best performance, you would want to use a Virtual Machine to prevent any environment discrepencies.

If you are new to Vagrant, you can read more about it and download it here.

If you are a Vagrant pro, we recommend the following steps.

Type in vagrant init ubuntu/focal64 or change your vagrantfile to config.vm.box = "ubuntu/focal64" to match the VM used to built this project. Generally, any other modern Ubuntu version would work too!

To start your vagrant VM type in the following two commands:

1. vagrant up 
2. vagrant ssh

You would also want to make sure your image is up to date by running sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Setting up Faz & Caw!

Follow the steps to set up our FaaS and Social Network service! This will set up both the cpp and go versions of the project!

1. sudo apt-get install build-essential
2. sudo apt-get install cmake
3. git clone [email protected]:floan/csci499_floan.git
4. cd csci499_floan
5. chmod +x make.sh (depending on permissions, you might need to use sudo)
6. ./make.sh (This will take some time, don't worry!)

Finally, in order to run anything you need to be in the newly created build repository. You can enter that using cd build.

Testing

Now that you've set everything up. Lets make sure it all works! To run the Caw Tests run the command ./caw_test and to run the key value store tests run the command ./kv_store_test. You can also run the key value store persistence tests using ./kv_store_persistence_test

Everything should be green and passing! All these commands are to be run inside the build folder.

Starting up the application

In order to fully use the application, you will have to start up some servers. Please open 3 terminals and navigate to the build folder. Enter these two commands on DIFFERENT terminals.

1. ./faz
2. ./kv_store

Alternatively, you can choose to make your data persist after you have closed the server / restore your data when restarting the server. In order to specify a file to store the data to / read the data from, run the following command instead of #2 above.

2. ./kv_store --store <filename>

The third terminal will be yours to use with Caw! Read on to find out how!

Using Caw!

Here is a list of all of Caws features!

1. registeruser to register a user!
2. user to specify whose account is using the app!
3. caw to post a new caw!
4. reply to reply to an existing caw!
5. follow to follow a fellow caw user!
6. read to read a thread of caws!
7. profile to get a list of the users followers and following!
8. stream Streams all new caws containing ‘hashtag’!

Caw is designed to allow the user to interract with it through the command line. All commands should be run within the build folder. Please read on to learn more about the commands and how to use them!

The caw application provides you a client in both CPP and Go. To use the CPP client, replace the keyword <client> with ./caw in all the commands below. Similarly, to use the Go client, replace the keyword <client> with ./caw_go in all the commands below.

1. Initially all functions will need to be hooked to our Faz service. In order to do this, run the command <client> --hookall. You can also unhook all functions by running <client> --unhookall. If you want more flexibility, you can also use <client> --hook <function name> and <client> --unhook <function name>. Once all functions are hooked, you can start using them!

2. In order to register a user, you must specify the username with our --registeruser flag. Here is an example: <client> --registeruser "fayez"

3. In order to post a caw, you must specify the user posting, and the text to post! You can specify the text to post using our --caw flag. Here is an example: <client> --user "fayez" --caw "Hello World!" Please remember that only registered users can post caws!

4. In order to reply to a caw, you must specify the user replying, the caw to reply to and the text with which the user wants to reply! You can specify the caw id to reply to using our --reply flag. Here is an example: <client> --user "fayez" --reply 1 --caw "Hi Fayez! From the world."

5. In order to follow a caw, you must specify your username and the username of who you wish to follow! Here is an example: <client> --user "fayez" --follow "Adam". Please note, you can only follow registered users!

6. In order to read a caw thread, you must specify your username and the thread id which you wish to begin reading from. You can specify the caw id to start reading from using our --read flag. Here is an example: <client> --user "fayez" --read 1.

7. In order to display a profile, you must specify the username of the profile you wish to see! Here is an example: <client> --user "fayez" --profile.

8. Stream returns all new caws containing the given hashtag that are created after the time of the stream call. Stream only works in the C++ client. Here is an example: <client> --stream helloWorld.

If you are looking for more information, or just feel a little lost, feel free to use the command <client> --help for more information! Lastly, if you have any issues with the program, or you want to suggest an upgrade, feel free to create an issue on our github page!

Here is an example of running the program with the actual keywords (rather than <client>):

./caw --registeruser "Fayez"
./caw_go --registeruser "Adam"

We hope you enjoy using Caw! Bye!