Note: This project's a bit old now :) However, you are free to branch it out and commit PRs

MobileHub Question Answering System

What is MobileHub?

MobileHub is a question answering system (something like Stack Overflow) built on top of CodeIgniter platform. The project contains both client and server side solution.

This project was developed to practice MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern. The client side was developed purely using Javascript and the server side was implemented using Codeigniter (PHP) framework. MySQL was used for persistence and OpenSSL was integrated in order to perform secure transactions throughout the entire site.

For more information and screenshots, refer my blog:https://medium.com/@sahan91/mobilehub-question-answering-system-feaeb75f5085

Tech

Client Side

• jQuery was used to handle the client side logic including, rendering of UI elements, communicating with the REST API of the web application, validations and UI animations. - Twitter Bootstrap JavaScript plugin was used to handle several UI components such as modals, dialog boxes, tabs, breadcrumbs etc.
• Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework was used to stylise the application along with Font Awesome, Google fonts API to apply fonts and glyph icons. Several client side validations have been carried out using the bootstrap max-length plugin and a plugin called Form validator which was written on top of jQuery.
• DataTable jQuery plugin was used to display data in the admin panel.
• Morris.Js and Raphaël.Js was used to create the charts of the admin panel dashboard.

Server Side

• Apache Web Server (version 2.4.4) was chosen as the backend server software because of its openness which results in much more easier configurations when compared with other server side software. Moreover, Apache Web Server provides SSL/TLS support which was harnessed to implement the functional requirements of MobileHub.
• MySQL Database Server (version 5.6.12) was used for the persistent storage layer of the application. MySQL is a popular relational database management system because of its ease of use, scalability, high performance and robustness. In addition, with the help of the phpMyAdmin web interface, it is easy to configure and perform transactions such as managing several databases, mapping relationships of the tables, choosing indexes for columns etc.
• PHP (version 5.4.12) was used as the server side scripting language which caters as the backbone for the CodeIgniter framework.
• OpenSSL (version 1.0.1) was used in combination with the Apache Web Server to support SSL and TLS transactions over the HTTPS protocol. OpenSSL is used worldwide because it is a robust, open source, support for SSL v2/v3 TLS v1 and its support for general purpose cryptography libraries for creating SSL certificates etc.
• Additionally, Sendmail (version 8.14.7), an email routing software which supports many mail transfer methods such as SMTP, in conjunction with STunnel (version 4.56) an open source software used as a TLS/SSL tunnelling service, were used to configure the email sending capabilities (from the localhost) of the web application.

Installation

1. First install XAMPP or WAMP (Or you can copy the instance included in the WAMP folder here)
2. Copy and Paste the MobileHub folder located in to the www folder or htdocs folder.
3. Log in to your MySQL server instance using your credentials and import the db script included in this repoOnce the everything is setup you still need to do some configurations before running the project.
4. Copy the /Server Configurations/conf/ to wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.4.4 (This folder contains the necessary certificates)
5. Import the certificated located in /Server Configurations/conf/ssl.crt in to your browser
6. Go to your WAMP MANAGER and enable the following modules:
   1. Apache -> Modules -> ssl_module
   2. Apache -> Modules -> socache_dbm_module
   3. Apache -> Modules -> socache_shmcb_module
   4. Apache -> Modules -> ssl_module
   5. PHP -> Extensions -> php_sockets
   6. Apache -> Modules -> rewrite_module
7. Download and install STunnel : https://www.stunnel.org/downloads/stunnel-4.56-installer.exe
8. Replace your apache/bin with /Server Configurations/apache/Apache2.4.4/bin
9. Add sendmail folder to the root of WAMP.
10. httpd.conf has been added in case.

Author

Sahan Serasinghe - lk.linkedin.com/in/sahanserasinghe | @sahan91

Version

1.0

License

MIT

Free Software, Hell Yeah!