IFTTT-CLONE

About

This project is a clone of the IFTTT service realized using Spring and AngulasJS as final assignment for the course Applicazioni Internet of the Politecnico di Torino.

Terminology

The user can create recipes that connect a trigger with an action: for example, a possible recipe is "if the temperature in Turin is above 30 °C, send me an email".

A channel is a set of triggers and actions that interact with a particular external service. For example, the Gmail channel interacts with Gmail and it is composed of a trigger (if I receive an email) and an action (send an email).

The trigger and the action have a set of fields: the values of the fields are specified by the user and they are linked to a particular recipe. The fields of the trigger in the example recipe are the name of the location and the value of the temperature, while the fields of the action are the email address, the subject and the text of the email.

A trigger may export a set of ingredients: the value of the ingredients can be inserted in the fields of the action. For example, the trigger "if the temperature is above" exports as ingredient the value of the temperature. If in a field of the action the user writes {{CurrTempCelsius}}, it will be substituted with the actual value.

Architecture

The channels are classes inside the package iftttclone.channels that extend the abstract class AbstractChannel: each trigger or action correspond to a specific method and the fields are their parameters. A trigger returns a list of maps if the corresponding action needs to be invoked (eventually multiple times): the map represent the association among the name of an ingredient and the actual value. If there is no need to invoke the action, the trigger returns null.

The channels are annotated in order to describe how their methods can be used in a recipe. Each channel, trigger and action is associated with a name and a description. Each trigger is optionally associated with a set of ingredients: for each ingredient a name, a description and an example must be provided. Each field has a name, a description and a type. The type is used by the iftttclone.core.Validator class to check its syntactical correctness when a recipe is created or modified. A field is always serialized in the database as a string.

When the application is loaded the iftttclone.core.DatabasePopulator class reads the available annotations and stores them in the database. Every 15 minutes the iftttclone.core.Scheduler class processes the active recipes: for each recipe it invokes the trigger and if it is necessary also the action(s) parsing the fields in order to add the value of the ingredients. The AbstractChannel class is populated with information about the current user and the last time the recipe was run.

Configuration

Some custom configuration files are required in order to run the application. These files need to be created according to the examples provided.

src/main/resources/application.properties

This file contains the configuration of JDBC, Hibernate, and the fixed delay at which the scheduler will run. This application requires a relational database. The dependencies declared in the pom.xml file assume that the MariaDB database is used. When the application is deployed in production the hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto field must be set to validate; however, the first time that the application is run, in order to create the schema, it must be set to create.

jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/iftttclone
jdbc.username=root
jdbc.password=
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=validate
hibernate.show_sql=false
scheduler.fixedDelay=900000

src/main/resources/client_secret.json

This file is required in order to interact with the APIs of Google for managing Gmail and Google Calendar.

1. Connect to the Google APIs Console
2. Enable the Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Plus APIs (the last is only to get the email of the user in any of the Google APIs)
3. Add a new project and then create an OAuth client ID for a web application
4. Enter as Authorized JavaScript origins the domain of your application
5. Enter as Authorized redirect URIs:
   • https://[DOMAIN]/[PATH]/api/channels/gmail/authorize
   • https://[DOMAIN]/[PATH]/api/channels/google_calendar/authorize
6. Select Download JSON

src/main/resources/twitter4j.properties

This file is required in order to interact with the APIs of Twitter.

1. Go to Twitter Apps
2. Create a new app
3. On Website put the domain of your application
4. On Callback URL put: https://[DOMAIN]/[PATH]/api/channels/twitter/authorize
5. Under the Keys and Access Tokens tab you will find your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret; put them in the file.
6. In the Permissions tab select Read and Write.

It is also a good idea to check Enable Callback Locking.

oauth.consumerKey=
oauth.consumerSecret=

src/test/resources/application.properties

This file is required only if you plan to run the tests related to the channels. You must enter the authorization tokens for Gmail, Google Calendar and Twitter: these tokens can be retrieved from the channel_connector table after having connected the channels.

jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/iftttclone
jdbc.username=root
jdbc.password=
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=create
hibernate.show_sql=false
scheduler.fixedDelay=30000
gCalendar.token=
gCalendar.refreshToken=
gMail.token=
gMail.refreshToken=
gMail.selfAddr=
twitter.token=
twitter.secret=

Test

It is possible to run the tests related to the channels with the command mvn test.

This will create a set of recipes using a fake test channel and a regular channel: the result of their execution will be printed to the standard output.

Compilation

In order to compile the project it is sufficient to run the command mvn package -Dmaven.test.skip=true. This will create the resulting .war file.