NoteX is a web application designed as part of a Software Engineering course. Its goal is to provide a social platform where students can freely share their notes.
A working demo of the frontend is online at https://b3nny01.github.io/NoteX/

The development of NoteX followed a Rational Unified Process (RUP)-inspired methodology, divided into three key phases:

1. Requirements Analysis: Clearly defined the application's requirements to understand its intended functionality.
2. Problem Analysis: Identified challenges and proposed technology-independent solutions, focusing on developing the initial application domain model.
3. Project and Implementation: Translated the analysis into a concrete project, defining the system architecture and creating a working prototype.

After the Requirements Analysis, we created the following use case diagram:

The application involves four primary actors:

• User: An unauthenticated user who can search and download notes.
• SignedUser: A logged-in user who can:
  • Create, delete, and modify notebooks and notes within their virtual desk.
  • Review and report other users' notes.
• Assistant: Manages reported users and can shadow ban accounts.
• Administrator: Manages Assistant accounts and can restore user accounts.

During Problem Analysis, we developed the first version of the domain model, starting with actor translation into classes:

A key aspect was the relationship between a SignedUser and their VirtualDesk:

We also modeled the concept of Reports, where users can report others, and Assistants manage these reports:

NoteX follows a three-layer architecture:

1. Client: Built with React, the frontend interacts with the server through REST-inspired APIs. We used the create-react-app workflow, with a Node intermediary server. During the frontend development we used a mock version of the APIs, these mock APIs are the same used in the prototype deployed on github-pages
2. Server: The backend is powered by Java EE, with APIs organized into groups (e.g., registration, loginAndAuth, user management). Each group is managed by a servlet that delegates business logic to a controller. Controllers retrieve domain classes via Hibernate, execute methods, and persist changes.
3. Persistence: Persistence is managed by an RDBMS for domain-related data (e.g., user info, notebook names) and a web server for note files. This hybrid approach was chosen for simplicity and efficiency.

Release Architecture:

Here are the main pages of NoteX:

To simplify deployment, NoteX uses Gradle (v8.9, or gradlew), npm (v9.2.0), Node.js (v18.19.0), and Docker (v26.1.4).

To test the release architecture of the prototype, open the frontend/src/data/api.js file and change the ip variable with your ip address, then navigate to the project folder and run:

./gradlew deploy

This task will:

• Remove previous NoteX-related Docker containers.
• Generate the backend notex_backend.war using Gradle in the backend/build/libs folder.
• Build the frontend in the build folder using npm.
• Create and activate new application containers using Docker Compose.

Then, open Chrome and go to <your_ip>:8080/notex_frontend, which should display the following screen:

To test the frontend development architecture open the frontend/src/data/api.js file and change the APIs variable at the end of the file from

const APIs=APIs_REAL

to

const APIs=APIs_MOCK

Then open a terminal in the frontend folder and run:

npm start

This will start a Node server at localhost:3000/notex_frontend. Open this link in Chrome to view the NoteX homepage.

A working demo of the frontend is online at https://b3nny01.github.io/NoteX/

The project has been developed by:

• b3nny01
• aledeni