ARSnova

ARSnova is a modern approach to Audience Response Systems (ARS). It is released under the GPLv3 license and is offered as a Software as a Service free of charge. Head over to arsnova.eu to see it in action.

ARSnova consists of two projects: the mobile client and the backend. This repository contains the mobile client code. You will find the backend at thm-projects/arsnova-backend. If you plan to work on the client you have to build both repositories - the backend and the client.

Getting Started

The most convenient way to get started developing ARSnova is by using our Vagrant environment, found at thm-projects/arsnova-vagrant. Use your IDE on your host machine to make changes to ARSnova, while the build process is completely handled by the Vagrant box. You will not need to install any development tools.

arsnova-vagrant sets up a virtual machine for both development and production use. The basic usage is vagrant up, which will start the development environment. If you wish to start production as well, use vagrant up production.

Once any machine has been started, all required ARSnova repositories are automatically cloned from GitHub, so that you can start coding immediately.

To connect to your development machine, type vagrant ssh. After that, you can start ARSnova inside the machine by running ./start.sh. You can then access ARSnova from your host machine by opening http://localhost:8080.

QA Private Build

arsnova-vagrant also sets up the build environment we use internally at THM, which consists of Jenkins and SonarQube. The former provides a QA pipeline that builds, tests, analyzes, and finally deploys ARSnova to the production environment. SonarQube is used for the analyzation phase and provides a drill-down into many quality aspects, including technical debt.

While the development environment is running, Jenkins and SonarQube are available at:

• http://localhost:9000 (SonarQube)
• http://localhost:9090 (Jenkins)

QA Public Build

We also leverage the cloud provided by Travis CI and Sauce Labs to build and test ARSnova. Travis first builds and unit tests the software, then it instructs Sauce Labs to run smoke tests on different browsers and operating systems. This ensures that the basic features of ARSnova work across browsers and platforms. See this example to get an idea.

Our official build status provided by Travis CI:

• for ARSnova Backend
• for ARSnova Mobile

Development

This is the mobile client repository. The following chapters will guide you through the installation, as well as the utilization of all requirements you need to build and use the mobile client of ARSnova. Before you start, please ensure that the server part has been arranged completely.

Requirements

The mobile client uses Sencha Touch 2 as application framework. In order to work with the client you have to install Sencha Cmd 4 (version 5 is currently not compatible with ARSnova). The basic requirement for installing and using Sencha Cmd is the presence of Ruby and Java Runtime Environment 1.7 (or newer). Additionally, you need Grunt to build the frontend which runs on top of NodeJS. Before you continue, please ensure that all requirements are installed properly.

The download links to the referred requirements, as well as the installation guide for Sencha Cmd can be found here:

• Download Sencha Cmd
• Sencha Cmd documentation (see subsection "System Setup")

Building

ARSnova consists of two main projects: ARSnova Mobile (this repository) and ARSnova Backend. You have to build both projects separately, in order to work with the mobile client. If you need information regarding the installation of ARSnova Backend, please look up the read me at thm-projects/arsnova-backend.

ARSnova Mobile is built by the Grunt task runner. When building the frontend for the first time, you need to install the build dependencies via NPM:

npm install -g grunt-cli
cd /path/to/arsnova-mobile
npm install

Afterwards, you can create a web archive for a servlet container by running:

grunt package

This creates the archive arsnova-mobile.war in the target directory. If you just wish to build the production system without creating an archive, you can use

grunt build

Continuous Build

The commands above build the software in such a way that it can be put into production immediately. However, this is not the best way to develop a feature or to fix a bug. Instead, we provide several build commands, based on Sencha Cmd.

In order to develop and test on your local machine, you first need to run the ARSnova backend. You can use Jetty to start it:

cd /path/to/arsnova-backend
mvn jetty:run

Then, and before you call any build command, you have to refresh your Sencha Cmd project. To do so, open a second terminal and execute the following command:

cd /path/to/arsnova-mobile
grunt refresh

Next, we continously build ARSnova:

grunt run

grunt run will automatically inform you about code issues detected by JSCS and JSHint in files you modify. You can also run both code checkers via grunt lint, or separately via grunt jscs and grunt jshint.

Build Environments

For production, all JavaScript and CSS files are minified and put into the browser's cache. This is good to make your changes ready for production, but you might want to have a faster build including proper stack traces while you are still coding your feature. This is where the testing environment comes in.

By default, the production environment is used for grunt build while the testing environment is used for grunt run. You can change this behavior by appending :<environment> to the task name where <environment> can be one of Sencha's environments or one of the shortcuts prod and dev.

Credits

ARSnova is powered by Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen - University of Applied Sciences.