There are a number of journaling apps on the web today. They range from simple text area types to sophisticated apps with word analysis that can tell the user what she/he felt while writing a daily thought.
Some of them are free and others are not.
There is a fundamental problem with all of those apps however - privacy and anonimity.
Whoever owns the app, owns the content that users write. Even the most honest companies claiming they are not touching user data are still susceptible to hacker attacks that can expose user data at any time. We could generalize this by asserting that once user content leaves user's device, she/he is assumed to be compromised.
While this may not be important for some people who don't mind sharing their data in exchange for freemium services, for others, personal data protection is of highest importance. These people would not mind paying few dollars a month for assurance that their data belongs only to them.
The author of this project tries to solve this problem by using blockchain since that's what it is good at - obfuscating the user data and keeping it on the chain, forever. The only fees that users would have to pay are the transaction fees charged by miners.
The goal of this project is to be a proof of concept that authoring on the web can be fairly inexpensive and private.
It is a non-goal to show this as a complete solution with complicated business logic.
Due to the time constraint, the solution is in the early draft stage that still needs a lot of work put in.
The project is setup to be run locally.
Once the project is cloned make sure ganache and truffle are installed.
In separate tabs of terminal window run the following steps:
-
run
ganache-cli. Note that port is 8545. Copy the seed phrase. -
run
truffle deploy -
run
npm run dev -
Open the browser page if it wasn't opened automatically and navigate to http://localhost:8080/#/.
You will be able to see a very simple UI:
- Open Metamask extension and use the seed saved earlier to restore your accounts from ganache into Metamask. Make sure the network is private and is listening on port 8545.
Due to the lack of time I wasn't able to dive into intricacies of Vue framework and didn't use it as expected, including having awkward UI and reliance on alert window and console messages.
Journal.sol contains functions to return historic Journal entries by the user but as mentioned earlier, I didn't implement it in the UI. Therefore, you would have to open F12 to observe historic records in the console window.
As per specifications, test are located in root directory in /test folder.
JS solidity tests were chosen to be used for a more end-to-end scenarios.
To run test suite, type truffle test in the root directory of the project.
- String in from the body is being cutoff during the transfer, for some reason. Need to investigate why that is. The test is passing in Solidity JS tests so the issue is most likely on the front-end.
- The project hasn't been deployed to test networks and will be done outside of scope of this course.
- Add Date handling.
- Add transaction fee control handling.
- Add ability to encrypt the message.
- Add ability to display/edit author's name.
- Implement rich mime type support and integrate it with IPFS.