ericaddison
commented
7 years ago @mspagon OK, let's answer your other questions...
( @psigourney please butt in if any of this sounds unreasonable, or if I'm talking gibberish! )
My vision is that we separate any actual processing of requests into these so-called "Services", which for our purposes are just request handlers that live in our /source/services/ directory (we are not actually using the separate "services" feature of app-engine, though we could think about that for our final project). The reason that they are different is because they are essentially regular functions: you give them some input via a GET or POST request, and then receive some output via an HTTP status code or a JSON formatted string. These "services" should have nothing to do with HTML ... they should exist solely to provide raw information. I think pretty much everything we do that interacts with the database should happen through a service, so in addition to the services listed on the project description, I have created a few more (like Service_CreateTag, and Service_Subscribe, for instance. I will PR these tonight when I get home from work.
The reason this extra layer of complexity is beneficial is for a few reasons (ideally...):
- it abstracts the platform specific API calls into separate methods and presents a platform agnostic internal API (that is, the part of our code that creates the HTML or Android views doesn't need to know about NDB to call the services we write).
- Abstraction makes it easier to perform implementation changes: as long as we keep the API of the services consistent (i.e., keep the same inputs and outputs), other pieces of our app that talk to the services don't need to care about the internals.
- By having this platform agnostic approach, it will be much easier to implement the Android interface in part 3: we will just need to call the same service URLs, receive the same JSON data, and format it for Android in that case instead of HTML.
Before we had a clear view of the services part, Patrick and I were just trying to get anything working! It was not simple! Now that we have a more clear-ish (or at least less nothing-ish) view of our architecture, we should probably work on transferring the functionality of Main.py to use the services approach instead of the integrated (do they call that "monolithic"?) approach. So yes, Patrick and I were definitely inconsistent because there is still a lot of code that was just from us getting things going in the first place! Please feel free to make things more consistent and submit a PR :)
The Admin page! That was not a requirement, but making it was helpful when I was figuring out how to even query ndb at all! If you like the appearance, that is HTML blatantly lifted from an example within the Bootstrap HTML/CSS/JS package and modified to work with our templating. It would be awesome if we end up finding a cool Bootstrap theme we like and modifying our HTML pages to use that, because then things look soooo nice. That's probably not a thing for this week though ;)
WHAT ELSE should we talk about?
psigourney
Discuss structure and architecture related stuff here :)