Changes in Chatterl
July 23, 2009I haven’t worked on Chatterl for a few months but there are some fundemental changes that had been made back in March, apologies for the slow update but honestly I haven’t had much time with learning Rails & freelance work.
Summary
Well the main changes in chatterl are the following:
- Message storage
- Registration
- Introduction of unit tests
- CWIGA now RESTFUL
- API calls
I’ll go over each section, highlighting the main changes & who it affects Chatterl as a whole.
Meet CWIGA
After implementing Chatterl‘s basic functionality (see chatterl post). The next step was to create to implement CWIGA, Chatterl Web Interface Gateway API. With this new module Chatterl is able to be interacted with purely via HTTP. The first implementation was rough, the original source can be found here, though it allowed me to get a decent understanding of mochiweb at the time helped me produce this article. After implementing unit tests to cover the project as a whole I felt comfortable to make a few fundamental changes to CWIGA’s API and requests to Chatterl.
Registration
I’ve added very basic registration functionality to Chatterl, allowing users to register to the system, giving them the ability to retrieve archived messages & later creation of their own chat groups. In hindsight I’d like to move this functionality to the front-end (which I’ll more than likely be in Rails).
Message Storage
Again this was more experimental on my part and something I would like to move over to couchDB when I get the chance, for the moment, Chatterluses mnesia to store users messages when they are not logged into the system.
Added test cases
One of the main issues I’ve been having with Sinan more than anything else, was seperating my tests from the source code. I really hated the idea of having test & implementation code mixed in, so I stayed away from any kind of real testing until I got my head around it. Thanks to Kev Smith‘s own code, I finally got my head around EUnit, which I posted a short post on here.
Before I was comfortable with implementing any more functionality I had set out to cover as much of Chatterl‘s code as possible. In doing so I uncovered a number of silly little bugs (oversights) in the coding logics & made the necessary changes.
General cleanup
The way chatterl is called has also been improved, instead of having to go into erl you can simple run ./start-server.sh within the cd _build/development/apps/chatterl-0.1.2.0/ directory. This will start up all the processes need to use chatterl.
CWIGA is setup to listen on port 9000, so you can call it using curl or via a browser of your choice. It accepts XML & JSON requests & has been made more RESTful.
Hopefully in the near future I’ll have time to rewrite the code base and improve on the basic functionality but for the meantime I hope this helps others as much as its been an experience for me.
