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User Guide

Welcome to the Ermis wiki! This wiki aims to provide a thorough guide regarding Ermi's philosophy, installation, features and various other aspects of the project.

Keep in mind that this wiki is still a work in progress, and certain parts may be unfinished.

• Mercury-Client (Desktop): The user-facing desktop client application for communication.
• Ermis Μ (Mobile): The mobile client-side application powered by Flutter.
• Ermis-Server: The backend server that handles everything related to server-side.
• Ermis-Common: The shared library containing common functionalities and utilities used by both the client and server.

Vision

My vision while creating Ermis was to develop a server-side application that anyone can deploy with ease and efficiency to ensure it can run on even the oldest hardware. Alongside this, I aimed to build a client-side application - that boasts an intuitive and user-friendly interface - with a solid performance to complement the server. With a primary focus on security, the Ermis platform employs robust encryption methods to ensure the protection of user data and privacy. Ultimately, I aimed to create a platform where users can communicate freely and openly, knowing their information is safe from prying eyes. My ultimate aim is to create a platform that anyone can host with ease and communicate with.

Challenges Encountered

I have dedicated an immense amount of my life to building and refining this suite of applications. Finally seeing it emerge is cathartic, to say the least. The journey has been tough; I’ve genuinely lost count of how many times I’ve gone mad at a software bug or error. I have encountered hundreds of issues and problems, and resolving them took more time than I would like to admit.

Since this is my first project of such enormous magnitude, I faced challenges particularly related to maintainability and readability — aspects of code I had not dealt with before. I have lost track of the number of times I had to redo entire sections of the application upon discovering a more efficient approach. For instance, I initially started with a UDP server but realized that for a chatting application, a TCP server was more suitable.

I also began utilizing IO socket channels and much later down the line realized that NIO socket channels are best suited for such servers. Then I attempted to build my own NIO socket channel communication system. Ultimately, however, my endeavors were in vain and after some quick research, I realized there are frameworks specifically dedicated to these kinds of purposes. In the end, for the initial version of Ermis, I settled on Netty, a non-blocking I/O client-server framework.

I encountered similar back-and-forths with the database - alternating between MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and maybe even considering Cassandra at some point. Ultimately, I settled on PostgreSQL.

Set up Project Locally

In order to set up the Ermis repository and its components locally follow the ensuing steps:

1. Clone repository (How to clone GitHub repository)
2. Follow the setup process for each singula component individually (Mobile Client, Desktop Client, Server)