Volume 7, Issue 8, August – 2022 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology

ISSN No:-2456-2165

Distributed Workspace Using Cloud Technology and

Version Controlling
Nikhil Pujari Rohit Choudhari
Department of Information Technology Department of Information Technology
St. Francis Institute of Technology St. Francis Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India Mumbai, India

Rahul Shirolkar Dr. Minal Lopes

Department of Information Technology Department of Information Technology
St. Francis Institute of Technology St. Francis Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India Mumbai, India

Abstract:- Efficient management of stakeholders in any by authorized co-workers. This platform which can be used in
web project is need of the time. There are lots of a website developing organization, where website resources
stakeholders involved in a web project and managing can be bundled in one place [3].
everyone and everything becomes messy. To make the job
easier there for platforms that facilitate distributed This creates a workspace for every member in a project
development. With this system, “Distributed Workspace”, to view and use the resources for development. This
features of existing applications have been integrated and workspace gives the developers the luxury to host their project
more features have been appended to make development within the same platform without the need to download the
much easier. It is done by the algorithm which is based on repository and run it on a local machine [3]. This system
microservice architecture. The application aims to provide provides features like creating a roadmap, assigning task and
better source code accessibility and version control. It contact members. An efficient algorithm and such added
automates project operations and other development tools functionalities make this as a practical application.
all in one place. Mainly, it eliminated the overhead of
downloading the project files to the local machine. All these II. RELATED WORKS
make a platform where users can works, coordinate with
each other and share their resources, bridging the This section discusses the literature surveyed to build the
communication gap in a more efficient manner than the idea of distributed workspace with unique features. It was
existing applications. identified that some existing workspaces use only cloud
computing, only distributed computing or only version
Keywords:- ERP, Distributed Workspace, Developer controlling. The idea proposed in this paper integrate these
Workspace, Cloud Computing, Live Code Editor, Version features and aims to overcome the drawbacks of these existing
Control. projects.

I. INTRODUCTION  Microsoft Azure

Windows Azure platform offers a runtime execution
In today's world communication is a key to the success of environment for managed code to host and run scalable
any project. The work “Distributed Workspace" is based on the solutions. Each Windows Azure Compute instance is also a
aspects of providing ways for better communication between Virtual Machine (VM) instance created by the platform and
project team members [1]. This is done using distributed cloud only the number of instances is configured by the team hosting
servers i.e. more than one server acting together to perform a the application. Every VM instance runs an Azure agent to
large task in the system. In this system these distributed servers connect and interact with the Windows Azure fabric. Every
are Amazon’s EC2 instances. EC2 is a service that provides us VM has a local file system which can be utilized by the
to compute on virtual machine. These distributed servers web/worker role instance during their life-time, but once the
communicate with each other using API and are connected in VM instance is shut down, VM and local storage will go away.
a network storage. This system uses an amazon storage service Azure maintains 3 different instances of every application on
called the EFS, designed to provide scalable, elastic, the cloud and the end-user will not be aware of which instance
concurrent and encrypted file storage. Every EC2 instance is serving the specific request. Hence persistent storage is
makes use of this file system. required to support the application data and this can be met
using the Windows Azure Storage Service. With
The objective of this work is to develop a platform where geographically distributed canters, Windows Azure Compute
resources & work of every developer can be viewed and shared provides developers with the functionality to build, host and

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Volume 7, Issue 8, August – 2022 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
manage applications on the cloud. Application developers can IV. METHODOLOGY
connect to Windows Azure portal using Windows Live ID and
choose a hosting account to host applications on the cloud and
a storage account to store data or any relevant content on the
cloud. Certain applications can use either the hosting or
storage accounts or both. The accounts enable developers to
host and deploy applications on the Windows Azure platform.
Windows Azure presently supports three roles; web role
instance, worker role and VM role.

 Palantir: Coordinating distributed workspaces

By our observation Palantir not only requires the main
user to have knowledge of their own set of work but it also
requires the user to have knowledge about the changes done
by his/her developer colleague. Palantir provides the developer
with a graphical display. Specifically, Palantír allows
developers to better coordinate their activities by providing
each developer with a graphical display that shows the set of
artifacts they are modifying, meta-data about those artifacts
(e.g., artifact name, version number, author information, etc.),
and the severity and impact of the modifications being made in Fig 1 Conceptual Architecture of Palantír.[6]
parallel by other developers. Knowing this information allows
developers to better assess the ongoing activities and The above figure displays the architecture used for the
accordingly coordinate their activities amongst each other. creation of Palantir. The main role of the Palantir Client is to
intercept the severity and change impact events and translate
III. PROBLEM DEFINITION them into an internal representation that is subsequently used
by the visualization block. At a minimum, the visualization
Through the rigorous literature survey, it is observed that, component will show which artifacts are being checked-out
in a typical distributed project work, where more number of and checked-in and the severity and impact of each of the
people contribute, it is difficult to communicate with each other changes. In doing so, developers are presented with an
in a true manner [1]. The common problems encountered by increased level of awareness of other developers’ activities.
any website developer are assigning sharing, tasks, hosting, We intend to develop a range of visualizations from which each
having a progress report. developer can choose the one they prefer. Each of these
visualizations will be based on a different balance among the
The work in this paper, aims to solve these problems by amount of information displayed, interface usability, and
providing an environment where users can work in intrusiveness of the interface.
synchronism, controlled by a project administrator. The other
objectives of this work is to provide flexible version control. A. About the system
While working on different technologies and modules, it may Distributed workspace is categorized in two parts, a) front
sometimes become necessary to revert back to the older end: It is the dashboard available for the admin, and b) the
versions of the modules. It is observed that this is extremely backend that handles the files and maintains version control.
difficult in most of the existing workspace solutions because The front end dashboard interacts with the user/admin where
the current file is modified by multiple users simultaneously. they can edit files, add files, add employees, view their work
[2]. etc. The backend consists of two servers, ‘the php server’ and
the ‘Linux powered got server’. All actions performed in
The drawback of the systems which provide version frontend are received at the backend. The steps are as follows:
control is that it mandates the entire project repository to be
downloaded on the local machine making them less user By referring to Fig 2, the flow of the project can be
friendly. understood. First any user would visit the website having
information about us and how he/she could use the service.
When a new user signs up, if it is a company, it will register
itself and get a repository allocated with its company name on
the server. If it is an employee, he would have to enter the
unique company pin(known to the company admin only) to be
registered into the company.

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Volume 7, Issue 8, August – 2022 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
Once the user has signed up he/she would be prompted to
sign in. On successful sign in, the website would open up either
an admin dashboard, if sign in is performed through a company
email id or to the user dashboard, if sign in is performed
through an employee’s email id.

In an admin’s dashboard, the admin can add/Delete

employees in his company and add projects and upload
necessary files into the repository. The admin assigns a project
manager whose role is to select required employees added in
the company to his project and maintain the repository and
maintain a To-Do list. In a user’s dashboard, the
user/employee can view his colleagues in the company he
works, view projects assigned to him, keep a track of his works
and tasks in the To-Do list and view files in the repository
assigned to him and edit code using built-in code editor.

Fig. 3 Architecture of Distributed Workspace back-end

It can be seen that at the backend five servers dedicatedly

perform their respective tasks. The operations performed
through these servers are explained further.

Operation 1: Source code related operations

Step 1: Fetch source code related files to EFS file system from
git.
Step 2: Send the hierarchy of the files. Step 3:
Perform operation on files the EFS files by using the root id
and the file name and the type of operation to perform on the
file.

Fig. 2 Flow of Distributed Workspace

At the backend, it is mainly making use of two servers,

one is the php server and other is the git server. While creating
a project a git repository is created in the git server. Admin and
manager are assigned with the developer (dev) branch and
employees with their own branch named after their email id.
When the user has to access the project files, a request is sent
to the git server to load the files in the frontend. The editor will
have a file structure column, which will be received from the
server. It would only be the structure and not the files to save
the server load. Once the employee selects a file, the request
would be sent to the server and the file will be fetched and
displayed in the editor. When the employee saves the file, it is
stored in the php server. When the work is done, the employee
commits the file, with a commit message. Once this is done the
files saved on the server are committed and pushed to the git
repository.
Fig. 4 Microservice Architecture

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Volume 7, Issue 8, August – 2022 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
Operation 2: Test the work live. Fig 5 shows the example of how the merge server sends
Step 1: Load the editor from the above scenario. Step a conflict file when a conflict is detected. The conflicted file
2: Save the files on the server. returned by the ‘git handler’ has a specific format which
Step 3: Access the result of the file by going to the link: denoted where and on which branch the conflict has been
http://live.dwspace.tech/root_id. raised. The code between ‘<<<<<<< HEAD’ till ‘=======’ is
Step 4: The php server will check the files from the EFS system the part of code (in the base branch) which is different from
and retrieve the necessary files from it. the code in the incoming branch starting from ‘======’ till
‘>>>>>>> (followed by the hash code of the incoming
Operation 3: Project related operation branch)’.
Step 1: Create repository using the git init –bare command.
Step 2: Add branches to the repo using the name of the user. Distributed workspace project simplify this task of
Step 3: Perform project related operation on the repository like identifying the conflict by separating the two files and
delete branch, delete repo. highlighting the conflicted area in the files.

Operation 4: Rollback the branch The task for identifying this conflict is simplified in the
Step 1: Load the logs for that users on page load of the system where the conflict file is separated as two different
corresponding project. original files and the conflicted area is highlighted.
Step 2: Select the log for resting the head.
Step 3: Set request to the rollback server. Operation 6: Checkwork
Step 4: Server will fetch the files on the EFS system and then Step 1: Send request to the checkwork server for creation of
perform git reset –head command on the source files. the other branch source code file on the EFS system.
Step 5: Force push the code and the git tree on the remote Step 2: On the completion of the creation. Server will retun a
repository. root key to the user.
Step 3: User can access the details form workdone. Dwspace
Operation 5: Merge 2 branches .tech/root_id
Step 1: Load the repository files on to the EFS server. Step
2: Return the branches w.t.r. to the project. And send back to
the user. Step 3: user will send the base and upcoming
branch Step 4: Server will fetch the base branch and then the
upcoming and branch.
Step 5: Server will perform merge operation on to the base
branch.
Step 6: Server will then find the ‘=======’ sign for conflict
detection.
Step 7: Send back the hierarchy to the user. Step 8:
Use will fix the conflict and the commit the code.

Fig. 6 Micro server and its operations

Fig. 5 Format of conflict detected by git

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Volume 7, Issue 8, August – 2022 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
V. EXPERIMENTATIONS AND RESULTS

A) Application of the algorithm in the system

Fig 9 Rollback

Fig 9 shows Rollback feature used in version control. It is

Fig 7 Admin Editor possible that at some point the admin needs to retrieve the code
with older version compared to current version code which
Fig 7 shows the admin is assigned with a ‘developer(dev)’ user has committed recently. This can be done by clicking on
branch. This branch is considered as a production branch where it. the rollback button and selecting the commit message. All
the code stored is the final expected output of the project. The changes will be retrieved till the point where that selected
dev branch has a default file structure which can be altered by commit was performed.
creating a new file/folder or by uploading files/images from the
local machine. Every change done in the repository has to be
committed with a commit message and should be pushed.

Fig 8 shows the merge conflict page. As mentioned

above, the developer(dev) branch is the ones whose code is
considered as the final deployment version. As other
employees are working on their respective assigned branches.
At the end, the admin has to merge the code.

Fig 10 User Editor

Fig 10 shows the user editor. It works similar to the admin

editor. It displays the file allocated to the respective user
branch. Any work performed, when just ‘saved’, is stored on
the file server, once it is committed and pushed to the user
repository, it is saved in the ‘git’ server.

Fig 8 Handle Merge Conflict B) Performance analysis

Although the current version of this system is built at the
During the merge process it is very much possible that a lowest level of hardware configuration, it has gained a very
conflict might arise between the ‘dev’ branch and the employee decent range of performance. This can be easily scaled up using
branch. This is catered by this module, where the admin vast service options from AWS and any other available cloud
decides which code stays in the ‘dev’ branch. The code service providers at the time of deploying this project live for
highlighted in red, depicts that this part is different from the commercial use.
other branch and here the conflict has arisen.

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Volume 7, Issue 8, August – 2022 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
Table 1.2 shows the performance test results of important modules of this project and the time taken to perform it.

Table 1.2 Application performance analysis

Sr no. Module Name Operation performed Time take n (in sec)
All CRUD Operations performed on the mySQL database like IN-
1. Operations SERT, UPDATE, DEL ETE. <1
2. Project creation Git repository created on the Git server (installed on EC2). 3.78
3. Editor loading Fetching file hierarchy response from the server. 2.30
4. Loading a file in the editor area Fetch the file content from the hierarchy sent. 1
5. Upload Image Image is base64 format to the hierarchy selected. 2.1
6. Content from file content is 1.2
Save File fetched and stored in the corresponding file hierarchy.
7. All unsaved files are saved on the php server and a ‘git 1.5
Commit commit’ command is executed.
8. Push ‘git push’ command is executed 2.3
9. Load rollback logs Logs of all the of the 5
corresponding branch is requested
10. Populate branches options during merge Fetch all the branch name belonging to the corresponding 2.3
project.
11. Merge operation Fetch base branch and the merge with in coming branch 4.5
12. Download project Fetch files from git server, store it in a folder, convert into 3
zip and return this folder name in response.

Above performed task were carried out on branches testers a dedicated area to create test cases and run the , for
which sized around 12MB. These numbers can vary depending checking errors.
on the size of the files. The git which could perform a merge of
two 12 MB branches in 4 seconds could take even 10 minutes The features we provide to the public free of cost could
for a 100MB sized branch. Likewise, an image of 200 KB takes be optimized and customized according to the
less than 2 seconds to be stored but an image of 8 MB could clients/companies requirements, like providing an error
take more than 5 seconds. This depends upon the file size and detection system and also equipping the system with a
the server capacity. compiler if need be. Another source of revenue can be
providing domain names of their own company name, as the
VI. FUTURE SCOPE free one will have our domain name(dwspace.tech). We could
also add video conferencing to the system so that
Distributed Workspace, while building aimed at communication is easier between the members and a more
eliminating the hardships taken by the members of a web professional environment can be maintained.
project. The system is believed to overcome most of the
problems that existed in the current system by providing the VII. CONCLUSION
development means all at one place, in a user friendly fashion.
Though, it is always said that everything has a margin of The main focus of our project was to overcome the
improvement in them. So while consistently improving the drawbacks of existing systems and provide better
existing features in this system, the system has impressive communication, by providing the users with a workspace to
future scope as well. communicate. We have tried to integrate practical features into
the application which other applications may lack. Our
As Distributed Workspace is capable of managing algorithm makes distributed computing more efficient with the
multiple projects, the system can provide a periodic project help of microservers, each assigned with an independent role.
report, on the basis of which the admin could understand This can be seen in the application performance table, above in
whether or not the given task is completed by the employees . the report. The system has taken care of security aspects by
The efficiency at which the project is being built can also be giving a special privilege to the admin and controlled
calculated. There is a vast scope of improvement in our editor. access/privileges to the employees. We are making a project
We can provide a number of production tools and extensions environment that will be used for distributed product
for our editor like, syntax checker, parenthesis highlighter, development on a rapid scale using agile project management.
theme change, beautify tool, live share, auto completion, The project with its efficient algorithm has tried to be a better
multiple cursor, etc. We could add website templates to make alternative and at the same time believe that there is more scope
the work of developers easy, using the templates a lot of for improvement and make it a purposive application.
workload on the developers could be reduced. We can give the

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Volume 7, Issue 8, August – 2022 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
There are more applications like Github, Amazon Code
Commit[9], BitBucket, Google Cloud Source
Repositories[10], etc with similar concepts. However, this
system is been inspired by these mentioned application's core
concept of version control. This system has made maintaining
the codes simpler for students or individuals, working in a
small-scale project to use the system without worrying about
the complications of version management. By providing a
simple user interface and giving project management tools like
roadmap, to-do, contact(chat), live-testing, etc., this system
stand out from the other similar technologies in the market.

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