GSoC status report #2

It has been more than two weeks since the last (and somewhat late) status report, so here is the update about the new features I implemented the last two weeks.

OS X like “Go back to version” for Notes

Rainy now supports a TimeMachine like archiving of notes that are synced. Every note that is changed or deleted in the syncing process is saved with a revision number in a special archive table. Via the REST API the client can query the history for any given note, and possibly restore any previous versions (much like Dropbox file history). Since this a feature specific to Rainy and not part of the Tomboy REST API 1.0 specification, there is no support in any client whatsoever, yet. However, I plan to support it in the HTML5 web interface that I’ll be working on in the next weeks. During implementing, I hope to find any shortcomings in the API and fix them, so that at the end of the GSoC I can extend the API specification so that others can catch up on that. With the feature present in the Web interface, at least a user can view and restore older versions in the browser, in case he lost some important changes or wants to recover an already deleted note.

The note archive also supports the recently introduced note encryption, so make sure you don’t forget your password AND lose all your authenticated device keys (=OAuth tokens), else the whole archive will be unusable!

Approaching Midterm

My GSoC  is split up into pretty much two parts: In the first half (until mid-term), do all important server-side stuff like the new database support, note encryption and go-back-to-any archiving. The second half is more client-centric, as it covers a creation of an HTML5 backend (=client) to access the notes.

Since I managed to finish the server-side stuff a little early, I am right now polishing the code a bit and add more unit tests, to make sure new features are working as intended, stabilize the code, and to actually have something to show at the mid-term evaluation to my mentor. There is nothing more satisfying to a developer, than a list of (mostly) green lights after pressing the “Run tests” button 🙂 So far Rainy has around 120 unit tests (although some are modified derivations of tomboy-library), but most tests actually test against the real REST API with HTTP requests to a local server,  not against any mockups or mocked servers with predefined responses).