[PRIME] Android Phone PAX App Isn't Coming This Year, Sorry

VThornheart

10pm, I'll be there! I may be at my friends' office, but if I am I'll jump on mibbit to get on IRC.

jonxp

Great meeting. We have the beginnings of the application checked in to the repo.

VThornheart

Cool! I'll have to check it out tonight after work.

jonxp

Yeah, BEAST worked overtime to get the initial REST API up.

redhalo

jonxp wrote: »

Great meeting. We have the beginnings of the application checked in to the repo.

Do you want me to just continue to post ideas on Pivotal, or was there something productive I should be doing at this stage? It sounded like you have the programming covered (whew).

Also, for ideas and thoughts that don't warrant a concrete posting on Pivotal yet, are we just discussing them here or did we have something more formal outside of the forum?

And just to get it out there, I posted an idea for VT's portion. Just throwing it out there, I didn't know if it was in bad form to post features on other people's parts. I probably should have discussed it first, but I got caught up in the moment.

I was planning on posting a Buttoneer thread when PAX registration opens, did we have a guestimate timeline for the release of the button side of the app? There's plenty of time, I'm just curious.

BEAST!

I wouldn't call it overtime jon, i had a lull at work where i realized anything i was working on in my day job couldn't be ready to go out in time for the current build, so i figured i'd finish getting the REST stuff working, haha

I think it's a solid enough foundation, or at least I hope it is.....there are still LOTS of bugs with it, i can tell this already, but it's at least out there working for the most part...i turned caching off because it wasn't working as it should though, will be totally rewriting that aspect of it

I see nobody has picked up the login stuff, I could pick it up if you'd like and probably get that stuff banged out tonight while I try to figure out where I want to go with the caching.

VThornheart

No worries redhalo! Input and ideas are good! I'll check it out tonight.

Also, well done BEAST!

Houn

Someone force me to write some Python tonight. No distractions.

RAWR PUMP IT UP CODE CODE CODE

The_Reflection

Houn write the damn code. I have one of these new-fangled G-Phones and no awesome PAX app.

Do it for me!!!!

jonxp

Man, I'll be writing code tomorrow. I need to figure out how we're going to handle authentication over REST.

BEAST!

i was just thinking about this earlier today, i'll probably not be working on anything tonight but i'll test some things out tomorrow...

i'm thinking we'll have an initial setup phase that creates their account (POST to us, hash the password, salt the hash of the password) and at this point we'll save a value to their device that will basically just be a never dying session id...this way it will always know who they are without re-inputting their information....and we can have a logout function too in case they want it to forget who they are

hmmm..i dunno..we'll have to talk it over...i may be thinking about this all wrong, who knows..haha

jonxp

BEAST! wrote: »

i was just thinking about this earlier today, i'll probably not be working on anything tonight but i'll test some things out tomorrow...

i'm thinking we'll have an initial setup phase that creates their account (POST to us, hash the password, salt the hash of the password) and at this point we'll save a value to their device that will basically just be a never dying session id...this way it will always know who they are without re-inputting their information....and we can have a logout function too in case they want it to forget who they are

hmmm..i dunno..we'll have to talk it over...i may be thinking about this all wrong, who knows..haha

[strike]See, the big thing about using REST is we can use the built in HTTP authentication methods. The idea is to not duplicate work that's already been done for us. However it remains to be seen if the Google login service allows this kind of functionality.[/strike]

There's a special API for it.

BEAST!

oh wow, i knew we could use their stuff for web app logins but from the phone itself i didn't realize they had a simple way to do it

duuuhhh...

now that we've got that out of the way, we need to decide when authentication is necessary...the easy route would be to require it to do anything at all (we could just specify login: required in app.yaml and be done with it), or we could go the hard way and specify it on a case by case basis (I'm unsure of just how much work that would take, with our added on REST stuff and all)

Houn

I'd say that logins should only be necessary for applications with POST or PUT methods; if the user wants to write something (like the wall). For simply reading the publicly viewable data (schedules, maps), no login should be required. IMO.

jonxp

Houn wrote: »

I'd say that logins should only be necessary for applications with POST or PUT methods; if the user wants to write something (like the wall). For simply reading the publicly viewable data (schedules, maps), no login should be required. IMO.

Of course. However, if we introduce any kind of customization (for example, I want to see my events list) we will need to authorize some GET requests as well. Like any auth system, it will be used where it makes sense.

VThornheart

I've been able to do 0 thus far. Our game's on the verge of being ready to submit to lotcheck, and as such I've been spending every non-day job hour over at the office. =( Basically, we ran into sort of a mini disaster: there was an entire second document worth of lotcheck requirements that it turns out we have to follow before we can submit the game, and we need them done like yesterday. =(

If we can get it to ship by the end of the month, things will be considerably less busy at that time. Until then though, I'm not sure if I'll have much time to think about it or be around in general. =( =(

BEAST!

You're off the team!!!!!

I too haven't done much of anything sadly, I'm working on stuff right now though so I don't feel TOO bad about myself.

Just get to things when you can though, it's understandable that other things will get in the way.

jonxp

This is why we have such a lax schedule.

Houn

Also, because Jon knows how lazy I am.

In addition, I'm sick AGAIN this weekend. WTF, microorganisms. Go find a new host.

BEAST!

So I finally ACTUALLY sat down just now without getting sidetracked, and I'm playing around at the moment with some authentication within the REST object which isn't the most cute looking thing but it's much nicer than manually doing the user check yourself...although that's really not much extra code in the end..hmmm

We might need to talk this over actually, haha.

Basically, it's pretty easy as it is to check if a user is logged in....

user = users.get_current_user()

        if not user:
            return "401"
        else:
           # do whatever the hell else you want to do

And since we're authenticating a user, we probably want to know their username anyway so it would be nice to have that handy.

BUT, we don't want to throw a 401 always. If we're coming from a webbrowser we'd like to just redirect to the login page instead of giving them a 401. Now, I do think we'd only want to do this on requests for html pages (calling for anything else we shouldn't assume that they can handle html). So because of this added level of confusion, it would be nice if we didn't have to deal with that crap every time we wanted to check if a user is logged in.

So, what I've written is just setting a flag within any Class, if you set loginRequired = 1 it will require login for everything you do in that Class, or you could set loginRequired = to only require it for those actions

Just some things I've been going over, haha. I figured I should throw my thoughts out there before saying "this is how it is and you will like it!"

jonxp

BEAST! wrote: »

So I finally ACTUALLY sat down just now without getting sidetracked, and I'm playing around at the moment with some authentication within the REST object which isn't the most cute looking thing but it's much nicer than manually doing the user check yourself...although that's really not much extra code in the end..hmmm

We might need to talk this over actually, haha.

Basically, it's pretty easy as it is to check if a user is logged in....

user = users.get_current_user()

        if not user:
            return "401"
        else:
           # do whatever the hell else you want to do

And since we're authenticating a user, we probably want to know their username anyway so it would be nice to have that handy.

BUT, we don't want to throw a 401 always. If we're coming from a webbrowser we'd like to just redirect to the login page instead of giving them a 401. Now, I do think we'd only want to do this on requests for html pages (calling for anything else we shouldn't assume that they can handle html). So because of this added level of confusion, it would be nice if we didn't have to deal with that crap every time we wanted to check if a user is logged in.

So, what I've written is just setting a flag within any Class, if you set loginRequired = 1 it will require login for everything you do in that Class, or you could set loginRequired = to only require it for those actions

Just some things I've been going over, haha. I figured I should throw my thoughts out there before saying "this is how it is and you will like it!"

Mostly works for me. The main issue is that we're going to have some extra fields in our database for users. We may need to change user = users.get_current_user() to something more universal in order to make sure we have the required internal data for the user stored.

VThornheart

WOOOOOOOOOOT!

I wish I had a digital camera right now.

It's 4:38am, and I finally got the Wii Remote strap messages loading from the shared resources. My television is now telling me to put on and tighten my wrist strap. I've never been more happy to hear that message.

I think I'm going to sleep now. Work in 3.5 hours. =(

BEAST!

jonxp wrote: »

BEAST! wrote: »

So I finally ACTUALLY sat down just now without getting sidetracked, and I'm playing around at the moment with some authentication within the REST object which isn't the most cute looking thing but it's much nicer than manually doing the user check yourself...although that's really not much extra code in the end..hmmm

We might need to talk this over actually, haha.

Basically, it's pretty easy as it is to check if a user is logged in....

user = users.get_current_user()

        if not user:
            return "401"
        else:
           # do whatever the hell else you want to do

And since we're authenticating a user, we probably want to know their username anyway so it would be nice to have that handy.

BUT, we don't want to throw a 401 always. If we're coming from a webbrowser we'd like to just redirect to the login page instead of giving them a 401. Now, I do think we'd only want to do this on requests for html pages (calling for anything else we shouldn't assume that they can handle html). So because of this added level of confusion, it would be nice if we didn't have to deal with that crap every time we wanted to check if a user is logged in.

So, what I've written is just setting a flag within any Class, if you set loginRequired = 1 it will require login for everything you do in that Class, or you could set loginRequired = to only require it for those actions

Just some things I've been going over, haha. I figured I should throw my thoughts out there before saying "this is how it is and you will like it!"

Mostly works for me. The main issue is that we're going to have some extra fields in our database for users. We may need to change user = users.get_current_user() to something more universal in order to make sure we have the required internal data for the user stored.

yeah, and i've thought about that, I'll probably include all the user data within the rest call....so if a user is logged in it will grab all the info necessary and wrap it up nicely

adding the loginRequired line is a little ugly looking but it's the most elegant way of doing it that i can see without writing the rest stuff completely on my own

Kyouteki

I'm only just now starting on PAXScheduler 3.0 (PAXScheduler '09? PAXScheduler Vista?), but I plan on exposing the events on the backend using iCalendar (.ics). I'll probably be using STATUS to indicate if a user is going to an event or not, marking events they aren't going to as TENTATIVE and events they are going to as BUSY. Or something, I'm still really just in a planning stage at this point.

Googalash

I need to read this forum more.....

downloading app ASAP

VThornheart

Sorry I've been gone for so long... I'm not going to be able to be of much help until this game my friends and I are working on ships. My friends' basically run out of money to put into it, so we're putting in whatever we can to keep things like electricity and rent going at the little office we have... but if we don't ship soon, we're going to be up the creek... so I'm giving it a long, hard push hoping to get it out the door asap (sadly, it's not quite polished yet visually... =( But the gameplay's still fun I think ).

But I digress... I wanted to tell anyone looking for a G1 phone that I just saw this by happenstance:

http://www.amazon.com/T-Mobile-G1-Phone-Google-Black/dp/B001JT1U1E/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1236702869&sr=8-2

If you don't have one and can spare the initial hit, it's 100 bucks now instead of 200 at Amazon (though just for the black model).

I'll talk to you guys soon!

MeeOk

I just got a G1 yesterday, so this thread is pertinent to me now... XD

HotSake

And I just ordered a G1...

jonxp

Alright, I'll get back to work. Been a little bit in the dumps as of late, job prospects dim. I guess working on this will give me *something* to occupy my time.

bigwah

Why are phone companies dicks? Exclusive partnerships are stupid. I'd like a G1 but I'm not paying $400 for it.

VThornheart

Then you're in luck:

http://www.amazon.com/T-Mobile-G1-Phone-Google-Black/dp/B001JT1U1E/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1237340361&sr=8-1

It's 99 bucks. You have to use T-Mobile (I know, that sucks), but you save 300 bucks upfront, and you get the best price for phone + internet short of using MetroPCS's all in one package (which is only in very limited areas, and I believe only runs on EDGE or GPRS at best).

jonxp

BEAST: How do we use the REST stuff?

jonxp

Status update:

In the interests of time, I've moved over to writing it using the languages and frameworks I know better, and have started in with Ruby on Rails.

We won't be super scalable anymore...but I doubt we'll be getting millions of hits a day either.

User registration and login is working, and the backend for the buttons is started. Should have the web interface by next week and Android the week after.


Need HTML designers to make the site layout!

Serenity

I'm up for it...

jonxp

Hooray! You and GPR are both volunteering, so....FIGHT.

But yeah, what I need is really an overarching site design. I can fill in the smaller details, but my aesthetic sense sucks.

What the "main" template page needs...

• A login/logged in box
• A menu for quickly navigating between the various components (button trading, shoutbox, cow tipping, etc). The "Main Menu".
• a "main content" section where the application will reside
• A menu for quickly navigating between various options of the current application. The "Sub Menu". May or may not exist on every page.
• Some sort of header that informs people that this is indeed the Pax App that they happened upon in their interneting

VThornheart

Aye, sorry that I haven't been there to help JonXP =( With everything going on with the two jobs (and now leaving the day job to go to another day job, which has been a long time coming but I digress ), I've had no spare time for any side projects. =( =( Oy. =(

jonxp

No worries man, I don't have any expectations for anyone aside from me. It's my baby, and I'm the only person who should care.

VThornheart

Aww =( I care! I just... oy... I have older promises to keep. =( Before I realized just how much work the game still needed, I pictured myself having time for both the game and this... but once I saw how much was still to be done at the start of the year... well, I'm pulling at least 10 hours a night 7 days a week over here now after my day job. =( When it's done though, I'm going to try and regroup and then help you out again! (If I can ever get past these gorram memory leaks... memory leaks make me want to cry. =( )

lordthanda

Damn, I knew I should've been watching this page.
I've got a little talent with Ruby on Rails, so if I can be of help, please let me know!

GPIA7R

What about us Blackberry people?

Man, a single, universal phone app to keep groups of PAX people connected to each other... even with an overview map showing our locations... that'd be cool.

Very awesome, by the way