Transport protocols simulator

This is a project under construction. Its main objective is to present graphic visualizations of Automatic Repeat Request protocols like Stop-and-Wait, Go-Back-N and Selective Repeat. Here is a link to the simulator hosted with GitHub Pages.

The project is divided into two main components, the transport protocols library under /lib and the graphic simulator user interface that uses the library. For now you can find examples of how to use the library in the tests under /lib/tests in the project repository. Here is also a link for the documentation of the library.

Local development

To develop the project on your machine, you will need Node.js and npm, which comes with Node. After clonning the project repository you should open your console and execute:

cd transport-protocols-simulator # Enter the project files
npm install # Install project dependencies

This will install the project dependencies, which are only development dependencies, meaning that the actual source code does not use any external libraries. The only dependencies are for testing and generating documentation.

Library testing

We use Mocha for testing the transport protocols library, as the tests can be run on the browser. To run the tests you will have to use an HTTP server, because we use JavaScript modules and these have some CORS security requirements. We recommend the Live Server extension for VS Code, it will execute any changes automatically, but just to make sure, we also recommend you to manually reload the page when running tests.

To run the tests you have to execute the file /lib/tests/mocha.html on the browser. If you are using VS Code with Live Server, right click over the file in the editor and then click over "Open with Live Server".

To make changes to the tests, these are under /lib/tests. If you only want to run a subset of them, read about exclusive tests in the Mocha documentation.

Documentation geneneration

To generate the documentation we use JSDoc. We also use a template under a folder called jsdoc-template, which is a git submodule and comes from a third party repo. To download the template execute the following command from the root of the project:

git submodule update --init

Then, if you make changes to documentation comments across the project, you should run npm run doc to update the documentation. This will generate a website under a folder called docs, which we serve using GitHub Pages. Don't forget to commit any changes to the documentation.

User interface

We have a mockup of the user interface made with Figma, here is a link to the mockup.

Fontawesome

We use Fontawesome 5.15.1-web (CSS). Meanwhile, this is under a folder called fontawesome in the root of the project, but we could change this by using Webpack and npm if in the future we add new dependencies and need to better manage them.