Social Features Project: Week 12

The final week of GSoC has rolled in and my blog post is incredibly late too as I spent much of my time working on my code.

My final version is upload on my app engine instance here. It consists of User Pages, Calendars and a Map View. The Calendars feature is functional and works as per the workflow I had originally planned. The past week had some last minute bugs which popped up only when I ran my code on AppEngine as they were not detected while I was testing on local host. The bug was that I was storing a universal session authtoken for the entire application instead of one for each user. This did not show on my own machine as I always used it under my own google account! Hence, I had to spend time to rectify this and ensure that each User model stores the session token and later the services uses the set token when the user decides to use the calendars feature.
This issue has been fixed now. However, I believe it will take a bit more work to integrate it and will have to spend time with my mentor in revising the finer details before actual code integration with the main code base. I look forward to doing this in the week after next.

My latest code is uploaded to my bit bucket account here.

Some problems still awaiting to be solved are nasty server error being cause by issues in the Google Calendars API, which I thought I resolved however, they still seem to pop up randomly. The issue has been taken up by others using the API here, although there does not seem to be a good fix for this yet.

Another thing that needs to be settled is the scalability of the Maps View. As GSoC has about a 1000 students, 1000 mentors and then org_admins etc. Right now, as I am having to manually populate the data, the map view has hardly 40-50 pointers on it. Hence how will the JS handle a large number of objects is to be seen as yet.

Finally, it has been a great experience with loads of learning and coding. It has been great working with the Melange team, and specially my mentor Madhu. :)
I am looking forward to staying with Melange and contributing to the project as best as I can in the future too.