2018-10-19
in
3 min read
Another day another progress report on the state of the Diaspora API development. I had hoped by now that I’d be picking up a little more speed but I always underestimate how minute working on high coverage unit tests are. If I was doing a whack it together MVP startup-mode app I would always put automated tests around it for my own sanity but since things are going to change, or maybe even get thrown away entirely, in relatively short order there’s no need to go gnat’s ass down to the details. That’s not the case with the API. Yes the API is technically in a draft mode but it always looked like a really good draft. The more I code against it and use it the more I believe that’s true. Yes, my development speed is increasing as I become more familiar with all the technologies and get past some more technical hurdles but it might take the better part of a man month to finish this up (which is maybe a man-week more than I originally eyeballed).
The progress though has been steady. I had a hiccup late last night with my test harness. The Fuel HTTP library I’m using in Kotlin pushed a new release that requires the 1.30 version of Kotlin, which apparently is harder to come by than I thought. Manually setting the version fixed it all but not until after I spent half an hour fumbling around with it before giving up. Today was the deep dive into the Comments endpoint. As was the case with the previous Likes endpoint Frank’s previous work left a very solid base. Fleshing out the tests for some different errant behaviors, testing error messages as well as codes, and finding problems with the interactions once the test harness interacts with it over HTTP were the usual gremlins to squash. Still, with only two more mostly fleshed out end points to work with coming from Frank’s code base, I have a feeling that the development pace will be slowing down. Maybe I’ll have gained sufficient efficiencies in my speed of coding on all of these to make up some of that difference.
Along with the above gremlins now that it’s being interacted with I am seeing some potential small grained details that need to be discussed about the API. That’s all tracked in the issue tracker on the API documentation page though. Again, this is solid work by the team putting the API together and Frank’s initial code base that I’m starting from.
In summary progress for the day:
- Comments API Endpoint is finished and ready for pull request
- Test harness example of interacting with the Comments API is completed
- Some Issues were submitted to discuss minor changes to the status reporting back from the REST services on things like what happens when a Comment ID doesn’t match the Post ID that the REST endpoint was called with.
- Some small documentation touch ups to address navigation