Google Summer of Code 2017

Continuing my last post. When using SQL database a very important aspect is the table schema. What is the best schema for a table. I feel we can never say this definitely we can only try making it better. We had 2 choice when deciding on the schema for the notification app.  One notification table for all types of notification (Owner, Group and Watching) Three notification table for 3 types of notification We decided to go with the second option. You ask why. The needs of the three notification are totally different. For example, owner notification needs to be related to User table while Group notification needs to be related to the group table. If we had used option 1 we would have many columns with null values for a large set of rows (remember this is SQL not NoSQL) creating a table with sparse data. Owner notification table schema is as follows: Column Name Data Type Data Range Description message String Notification messag...

Q & A of connecting Apache Kafka and Django Problem #1 Kafka consumer should always be listening for new messages in the queue. The consumer should be running in parallel to GraphSpace app (producer). Solution There are multiple ways to do this. We create another Django project say called "GraphSpace notification consumer" which starts along the GraphSpace application and establishes a connection with Kafka. This is an overkill for a simple consumer. We can use celery for multi-threading. Celery itself uses Redis or RabbitMQ as a queue for tasks. This setup might work for a large scale multi-threading system but for a simple setup of running a consumer this is a overkill. We will be running 2 queues (Redis and Kafka), one for queuing task and another for queuing content. I tried this setup with the following architecture: I will recommend keeping the architecture simple, run the consumer code on a different thread in daemon mode. Problem #2 Where ...

In this post, we will look at packages to build a real time notification system for GraphSpace. GraphSpace is built in Django. The requirements for our system are Decoupled from the main app ,i.e, should be non-blocking Use Apache Kafka as the message queue system Follow a producer-consumer architecture with broker, Kafka Able to handle different types of notification: Group, Owner and Watching The above requirements can be satisfied if we have a package that can connect to Kafka, have an ability to handle different types of notification and is non-blocking. To handle different type of notifications we can have producers and consumers send and receive messages with different topics. So the package we need should be able to dynamically do so. Instead of having say 10 producers for 10 topics and establishing 10 connections to Kafka, it is better we have 1 producer which can send messages with 10 different topics. Similarly 1 consumer should be able to subscribe to 10 different...

Notification System for GraphSpace Organization : National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB) GraphSpace is an user-friendly web-based platform that collaborating research groups can utilize for storage, interaction, and network sharing. A GraphSpace user can import graphs created in Cytoscape, upload them through a REST API, interact with them by customizing and saving layouts, share them within and between groups of collaborators, search for different graphs, and organize them using tags. These functions are enabled through GraphSpace’s comprehensive REST API, which allows users to communicate programmatically. Notifications are integral to all web applications as they are the means to tracking all important information. It is most optimal when a notification system is decoupled from the main application flow, because we can have a clear distinction between the utilities of the two applications. In this project, there are three primary types of notifications that need to...