Cinnamon Platform

Cinnamon Platform is the main application of Cinnamon. It is responsible for managing projects, data, processes and the communication with other modules. The frontend is also included in Cinnamon Platform.

Tasks

Cinnamon Platform is responsible for the following tasks:

Provision of General Information

Cinnamon’s workflow is dynamic because of its modularity and configurability. On the application level, processes can be added to the workflow and the order of processes can be changed. This requires the frontend to display the information dynamically. Cinnamon-Platform provides general information about workflows.

Data Management

Cinnamon is working with different types of data. Datasets containing the original data and results are stored together with their metadata in the platform. Cinnamon Platform provides functionalities for importing data from different sources into the platform and also for retrieving the data again. During the import, datasets are validated if they comply with the provided metadata. Potential error in the data are stored separately and can be retrieved together with the data.

Processes of external modules require configurations. These are also managed by the platform and stored as generic strings, so modules can define the structure independently of the Cinnamon Platform.

Results of processes can contain resources besides data sets, for example statistics or information about errors. These resources are stored as generic strings similar to the configurations.

Process Management

The entire workflow is based on processes that are executed by the various modules. Cinnamon Platform keeps track of these processes and provides utility for managing them, like starting, stopping and monitoring. A simple scheduling mechanism with a configurable maximum number of parallel processes per module can limit the required CPU resources. Results are sent to the platform via a callback mechanism.

User/Project Management

All information like datasets, processes and results are contained within projects. It tracks the state of each project and validates if actions are allowed. The platform also handles authentication and authorization for users.

Serving the frontend

The Cinnamon Platform module includes the frontend, which acts as the user interface for all aforementioned tasks. It fetches information on how to display configurations directly from the modules and information about processes from the platform.

Architecture

Cinnamon Platform is based on Java 17 and uses Spring Boot 3. It uses an underlying PostgreSQL database to store data. The frontend is written with Angular 15.