olaven / exam-pg6300

Exam in Web Development and API-Design at Kristiania University College.

Exam - Web Development and API Design

About the application

Before delivering:

• explicitly state that I am aming for A and every extra effort I have done.
• report coverage in readme
• assert test coverage
• remove unused stuff (like graphql, perhaps)
• test alle scritps
• clean up after wallaby
• optimaliseri mports
• assert that no part of exercise is forgotten
• test every feature manually
• test the app without internet connection
• deploy most recent version to heroku with "git push heroku master"

Admin user

• When running in development mode, it is possible to log in with:
  • email: [email protected]
  • password: dev For a list of all demo-users, see #23 in this file.

Extras

• I have added styling with Reactstrap. This required adding css-loaders to webpack.config.js.
• To ensure consistent code-style, I have used ESlint. This is also configured as an extra script.
• Although not required, I have set up Travis to automatically run tests
• The app is deployed to Heroku

Assumptions and coices

• The API
  • The endpoint for accepting/denying friend requests is at DELETE /api/friendRequests/ID. The use of DELETE may seem slightly unintuitive. However, the request is removed from the database when accepted or denied, thus the choice seems appropriate. Arguably, I could have used PUT instead, as the state of a user is updated/modified.
• Sockets
  • As mentioned in a file from the course repo, using passport for authentication has some limitations with websockets. Another, token-based approach is used. In the timeline.jsx, I use something akin to this token-approach. In conversations.js, however, I use the passport-session to compare emails. My assumption is that for the purposes of this exam, showing two ways of doing something is better than showing one (or none).

General notes

• Modifications to yarn scripts:
  • configuring yarn start to set environment variable. It indicates wether the server is running in development mode or not. This way, I may add demo data only when application is not in production.
• notes about copying from course repo
  • Some files are completely copied. Others are copied, and later modified. This is differentiated in the comment.
  • JSON-format does not support comments. package.jsonis partially copied from this file
• dependencies not used in course
  • eslint and related plugins. This is to create lint-config appropriate for the project (like support for React)
• nanoid is used for generating random IDs. The library was updated recently, takes minimal amount of space, and has 700k weekly downloads.
  • cross-env is used for setting environment variables. I have access to a Mac. This should make sure that environment variable is working fine on non-UNIX systems as well
  • style-loader for loading styles to reactsrap.
• on general style
  • I could have written some functional components. In particular, smaller components with no state. However, I chose to stick with class based components for the sake of consistency. By "functional" and "class based", I am referring to the first and second example on this page, respectively.