Query Strings and more Unit Tests

While front-end work is always fun and demonstration-friendly more frequently than functional coding, all those pretty icons, animations, and colour schemes wouldn't be very useful without any backend code to provide purpose for their presence.

My work was focused on implementing pre-production logic in the session/authentication data handler functions to accept query string data (that comes in on the address bar) as well as standard cookie data. This was added to increase the flexibility of MakeDrive to be able to cater to such things as firefox extensions sending incoming verification data.

The rest of last week revolved around adding more unit tests to increase the comprehensiveness of the existing test suite in conformity to the complete overhaul of the client and server communications that are now completely reliant on Websockets. I was particularly concentrated on adding more test cases for the sync messages being passed back and forth.

In the usual cadence of things, overall the week was very tasking but ultimately very productive. MakeDrive is just about ready to be deployed out to the public, and after a design overhaul by the Mozilla UI/UX team, Nimble will follow soon thereafter.

Bug Squashing, Issue Triaging, and Nimble UI Enhancements

Communal elation in the group is still very apparent after the functional demo of Nimble and Makedrive working together, and we are all focusing that positive energy to keep a rigorous pace in order to arrive at the upcoming milestone this Friday revolving around getting MakeDrive to be stable enough to deploy to the public and be used in non-controlled environments such as the other Webmaker tools.

Last week, I created some fun and practical extensions to the front-end UI in order to test the Brackets appshell's potential in its current form in the context of being able to manipulate or change the end-user interface without having to change any of the code already implemented. I went ahead and recorded a video demo of my results on YouTube:

I can't help but feel proud of what little front-end programming prowess I've managed to cobble up, haha.

My focus this week veers back to backend functionality with more bug squashing on the MakeDrive end of things, particularly in the scope of webmaker authentication. I will be tackling some code removal/refactoring to eliminate unnecessary or arbitrary module imports and process executions as well as attempt to plug in support for query string session data as an alternative to cookies in order to extend webmaker-auth's login methods to be able to use firefox extensions and the like. Much learning will likely be had.

As always, stay tuned for more updates!

Realizing the Vision and Beyond

I couldn't find a better way to present this besides show and recommend anyone reading this to check out this YouTube Link. Everything this team has been working on for the past 2+ months now functionally amalgamated and in a state where the world can start seeing it. Nimble (Brackets) in the browser using the MakeDrive filesystem to sync files between active sessions of the same client. Extremely exciting!

The rest of the summer is about polishing and perfecting the operation of the project and adding features in order to really turn it into a bonafide Mozilla product that becomes a welcome addition to the rest of the Webmaker toolkit.

Nimble and MakeDrive's Future

As expected, with the help of the Webmaker team, I managed to finish a functional proof of concept implementation of the Websocket authentication module that Alan Glickman, Kieran Sedgwick and I planned out the week prior just in time to quickly demonstrate it on Tuesday.

On Thursday, our team also presented the current state of MakeDrive thus far and what has been accomplished up until now with the project. While the lack of practice in the areas of structuring roles and memorizing who begins what part of which area of focus left a bit to be desired, it was received with healthy amount of praise nonetheless.

After planning for the rest of the week and next week's tasks, Gideon Thomas and I began to pair program converting the client-to-server communications of MakeDrive from SSE's to Websockets. A very productive week on the whole for everyone on the team, and we're all hoping to end next week with a functioning instance of MakeDrive running inside Brackets on the browser for project lead David Humphrey's last week of working at CDOT for the summer. Fingers crossed.