[piperka-devel] Piperka Development Questions

[Kari Pahula]

Sorry about not replying sooner, I was a bit busy with things.  I used
this opportunity to set up a Piperka development mailing list.  I
hosted one previously on Piperka's own server but I think I'm better
off using a shared resource for this.

I'll leave it to you to join the list and to introduce yourself but I
hope you don't mind that I reply to the list with this and bcc you.  I
think it's better to not have me remain as the sole endpoint for
Piperka develompent discussions and to direct people to the mailing
list instead.

And the list's web page is at
https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/piperka-devel

> I recently came across Piperka, and I think it's a great idea that I'm glad
> you're developing further. I'm a computer science student learning some web
> and mobile development, and I thought it might be a good learning
> experience if I could contribute in some way. I noticed that there's an
> unofficial Piperka app on the Android marketplace, but it hasn't been
> updated since 2014. Do you know if that person has plans to update it once
> your backend rewrite is complete? I'd be happy to help out from the front
> end or back end where I can.

Thank you for your interest.  I haven't been in contact with the
author of the Android app since he published it.  I did some work to
enable it on the backend side but I haven't been involved with coding
the app itself at all and I can't really say anything much about it.

Mobile use of Piperka isn't that high on my personal priorities but
I'll certainly help with it if someone takes an interest with it.
I'll try to take care to not break any of the API endpoints when I get
to reimplement those with the new backend code.

One development idea related to Android (that unfortunately can't
really be started right now) is to make a Piperka project on Google
developer console and use that to manage accounts across devices.  To
make linking a Google account to the web site make an Android app
allow communicating Piperka by the same credentials, with no need to
input a user name and password to the app.  I'm sure that would enable
plenty of other use cases also.  But that's pending oauth2 logins for
the new backend code, which I'm on purpose going to do only when the
new code is in use.  Which will still take some time.

The backend rewrite is at a point that I could see other people
implement parts of it concurrently.  I'm working on the account
creation and password recovery code currently, though I admit that
there's quite a bit of learning curve involved since I'm using
Haskell, Snap and Heist for it.  Not your everyday web site
development tools though I've found them quite satisfactory for my
taste.  I even wrote a Heist tutorial to explain better how the new
backend code works: https://github.com/kaol/heist-tutorial

I'm afraid that the rewrite is still in a stage where all the
available tasks can be quite challenging.  I've made a (probably
incomplete) list at
https://alioth.debian.org/pm/task.php?group_project_id=347&group_id=101031&func=browse

My hope is that the end result will be a solid base for doing further
development and I'm not quite there yet.

For completeness' sake (I assume you've found these already), here's
the current, old codebase: http://piperka.net/src/ and this is the new
backend code (I started it as just the authentication backend and I
never split the Piperka specific part since I felt that the auth code
would take a better shape when the code using it would be more
mature): https://github.com/kaol/snaplet-customauth

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.