UCOSP Update, Week 4

Hello readers. Another busy week for me with many updates.

What I worked on this week.

My first pull request (link to PR) was merged this week. I learned a lot about how to format your PR commits and summaries properly so it will be accepted. So the next PR should go a lot smoother than this one (apologies to mtomwing :) ).

This week I worked on refactoring the recording api endpoint functions and fixing logic (link to PR). The reason that I didn't do this in the initial framework refactoring PR is that I essentially treated these methods as black boxes and only changed what needed to be changed to decouple the recording api routes from the server.py. Now that that work was complete I could focus on the internal logic of the endpoint functions. I made a number of changes, cleaned up if/else nests, and fixed some faulty logic. These changes are ongoing but should be merged very soon.

Finally, this week I began researching and implementing authentication for the Freeseer server. I read up on REST best practices, and tutorials on how to implement authentication in Flask, and I now have code implementing authentication in the REST server stashed and ready to go into its own branch once my most recent open pull request is merged. In its current state, if one tries to send requests via curl to the API it will give you an authentication error unless you provide -u admin:admin in the command. I need to think more about how we should go about authenticating many users, but it will probably involve tokens generated by the Freeseer server. I'll be focusing on this all week.

Changing priorities

Last week I posted my project proposal, and I've already received some feedback which made me decide to change one of my priorities for the UCOSP project. Worried that if I focused solely on the API framework I would run out of things to do this semester, I considered implementing server-client video streaming, but I was told that there was even more work that could be done to the api framework than what was stated in my proposal. Instead of implementing video streaming, I more than likely will be implementing a way to broadcast our Freeseer REST server over networks, and anything else I discover should be done.

Next week

Next week I will finish implementing authorization for the REST server, and finish the logic refactoring and fixes to the recording api. Looking forward to another busy week.

Until next time.

-Brenden