public/subjects/social-network

Social Network

Objectives

You will have to create a Facebook-like social network that will contain the following features:

• Followers
• Profile
• Posts
• Groups
• Notification
• Chats

Instructions

Frontend

Frontend development is the art of creating sites and web applications that render on the "client-side". It includes everything that users experience directly: text colors and styles, images, graphs and tables, buttons, colors, and navigation menus. It focuses on making requests to the backend in order to get specific chunks of data to be used or send data to be stored on the backend.

HTML, CSS, and Javascript are the languages used for frontend development. Responsiveness and performance are two main objectives of the frontend. Frontend frameworks may be used to simplify a developers work.

Framework

You will have to use a JS framework. It is up to you to choose which one you are going to use.

Frameworks will help you to organize and implement the features you want on your project, so that you can get more work done in a easier and faster way.

Some of the most known JS frameworks around are:

• React
• Vue.js
• svelte
• Mithril

Caution: Note that JS frameworks are different from JS libraries. JS libraries contain code snippets that are used to perform common JavaScript functions, while frameworks will help you by laying out the groundwork/building the bases for your JS project.

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Backend

The backend is all of the technology required to process the incoming requests and generate and send responses to the client. This is typically divided into three major parts:

• Server: is the computer that receives requests. Though there are machines made and optimized for this particular purpose, you will use your own computer.

• App: is the application running on the server that listens for requests, retrieves information from the database and sends responses. The server runs an app that contains all the logic about how to respond to various requests based on the HTTP or other types of protocols. Some of these handlers functions will be middleware. Middleware is any code that executes between the server receiving a request and sending a response.

• Database: is used, as you already know, to organize and persist data. Many requests sent to the server might require a database query. A client might request information that is stored in the database, or a client might submit data with their request to be added to the database.

App

The backend will consist, like said above, of an app containing all the backend logic. This logic will therefore have several middleware, for example:

• Authentication, since HTTP is a stateless protocol, we can use several ways to overcome and authenticate a client/user. You must use sessions and cookies.
• Images handling, supporting various types of extensions. In this project you have to handle at least JPEG, PNG and GIF types. You will have to store the images, it can be done by storing the file/path in the database and saving the image in a specific file system.
• Websocket, handling the connections in real time, between clients. This will help with the private chats.

For the web server you can take a look at caddy, it can serve your site, services and apps and its written in Go. Or you are free to create your own web server.

Sqlite

In order to store the data in your social network, you will use the database library SQLite. To structure your database and to achieve better performance we highly advise you to take a look at the entity relationship diagram and build one based on your own database.

To know more about SQLite you can check the SQLite page.

Migrate

You will have to create migrations for this project so every time the application runs, it creates the specific tables to make the project work properly.

For this, you must focus on a folder structure similar to this one:

student$ tree .
backend
├── pkg
│   ├── db
│   │   ├── migrations
│   │   │   └── sqlite
│   │   │       ├── 000001_create_users_table.down.sql
│   │   │       ├── 000001_create_users_table.up.sql
│   │   │       ├── 000002_create_posts_table.down.sql
│   │   │       └── 000002_create_posts_table.up.sql
│   │   └── sqlite
│   |       └── sqlite.go
|   |
|   └── ...other_pkgs.go
|
└── server.go

The folder structure is organized in a way that helps you to understand and use migrations, where you can apply it using a simple path, for example: file://backend/pkg/db/migrations/sqlite. It can be organized as you wish but do not forget that the application of migrations and the file organization will be tested.

For migrations you can use golang-migrate package or other package that better suits your project.

All migrations should be stored on a specific folder, as above. The sqlite.go should present the connection to the database, the applying of the migrations and other useful functionalities that you may need to implement.

This migration system can help you manage your time and testing, by filling your database.

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docker

You must create two images where one will serve the backend and the other will serve the frontend.

Both back and front must communicate, for that is the purpose of having them.

The communication is done in the browser so you will have to publish the ports for both backend and frontend.

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Authentication

In order for the users to use the social network they will have to make an account. So you will have to make a registration and login form. To register, every user should provide at least:

• Email
• Password
• First Name
• Last Name
• Date of Birth
• Avatar/Image (Optional)
• Nickname (Optional)
• About Me (Optional)

Note that the Avatar/Image, Nickname and About Me should be present in the form but the user can skip the filling of those fields.

When the user logins, he/she should stay logged in until he/she chooses a logout option that should be available at all times. For this you will have to implement sessions and cookies.

You can implement your own package for sessions and cookies or you can take a look at some packages to help you.

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Followers

When navigating the social network the user should be able to follow and unfollow other users. Needless to say that to unfollow a user you have to be following him/her.

In order to follow someone the user first needs to send a request to the user he/she wants to follow. Then the other user should be able to accept the request or decline it. If the second user has a public profile (explained in the next topic) this step is skipped and the sending of the request is ignored.

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Profile

Every profile should contain :

• User information (every information requested in the register form apart from the Password, obviously)
• User activity
  • Every post made by the user
• Followers and following users (display the users that are following the owner of the profile and who he/she is following)

There are two types of profiles: a public profile and a private profile. A public profile will display the information specified above to every user on the social network, while the private profile will only display that same information to their followers only.

When the user is in their own profile it should be available an option that allows the user to turn its profile public or private.

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Posts

After a user is logged in he/she can create posts and comments on already created posts. While creating a post or a comment, the user can include an image or GIF.

The user must be able to specify the privacy of the post:

• public (all users in the social network will be able to see the post)
• private (only followers of the creator of the post will be able to see the post)
• almost private (only the followers chosen by the creator of the post will be able to see it)

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Groups

A user must be able to create a group. The group should have a title and a description given by the creator and he/she can invite other users to join the group.

The invited users need to accept the invitation to be part of the group. They can also invite other people once they are already part of the group. Another way to enter the group is to request to be in it and only the creator of the group would be allowed to accept or refuse the request.

To make a request to enter a group the user must find it first. This will be possible by having a section where you can browse through all groups.

When in a group, a user can create posts and comment the posts already created. These posts and comments will only be displayed to members of the group.

A user belonging to the group can also create an event, making it available for the other group users. An event should have:

• Title
• Description
• Day/Time
• 2 Options (at least):
  • Going
  • Not going

After creating the event every user can choose one of the options for the event.

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Chat

The user should be able to send private messages to users that he/she is following. It should be able for the users to send emojis to each other.

The user that the message was sent to, will receive the message instantly, by the usage of Websockets, if he/she is following the user that sent the message or if the user has a public profile.

Groups should have a common chat room, so if a user is a member of the group he/she should be able to send and receive messages to this group chat.

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Notifications

A user must be able to see the notifications in every page of the project. New notifications are different from new private messages and should be displayed in a different way!

A user should be notified if he/she:

• has a private profile and some other user sends him/her a following request
• receives a group invitation, so he can refuse or accept the request
• is the creator of a group and another user requests to join the group, so he can refuse or accept the request
• is member of a group and an event is created

Every other notification created by you that isn't on the list is welcomed too.

Allowed Packages

• The standard Go packages are allowed
• Gorilla websocket
• golang-migrate
• sql-migration
• migration
• sqlite3
• bcrypt
• UUID

This project will help you learn about:

• Authentication :
  • Sessions and cookies
• Using and setting up Docker
  • Containerizing an application
  • Compatibility/Dependency
  • Creating images
• SQL language
  • Manipulation of databases
  • Migrations
• The basics of encryption
• Websocket