I was getting frustrated trying to map people's irc nicks to their GitHub usernames (and back again). I assume other people were having the same problem too. It's pretty hard to envisage a good technical solution to this. The best I could come up with was having a community phone book for the Rust community. I had been meaning to experiment a bit with some modern web dev technologies, so I thought this would be a good opportunity.
Some of the technologies I was interested in were the modern, client-side, JS frameworks (Ember, Angular, React, etc.), node.js, and RESTful APIs. I ended up using Ember, node.js, and the GitHub API. I had fun learning about these technologies and learnt a lot, although I don't think I did more than scratch the surface, especially with Ember, which is HUGE.
What made the project a little bit more interesting is that I have absolutely no interest in getting involved with user credentials - there is simply too much that can go wrong, security-wise, and no one wants to remember another username and password. To deal with this, I observed that pretty much everyone in the Rust community already has a GitHub account, so why not let GitHub do the hard work with security and logins, etc. It is possible to use GitHub authentication on your own website, but I thought it would be fun to use pull requests to maintain user data in the phone book, rather than having to develop a UI for adding and editing user data.
The design of rustaceans.org follows from the idea of making it pull request based: there is a repository, hosted on GitHub, which contains a JSON file for each user. Users can add or update their information by sending a pull request. When a PR is submitted, a GitHub hook sends a request to the rustaceans.org backend (the node.js bit). The backend does a little sanity checking (most importantly that the user has only updated their own data), then merges the PR, then updates the backing database with the user's new data (the db could be considered a cache for the user data repository, it can be completely rebuilt from the repo when necessary).
The backend exposes a web service to access the db. This provides two functions as an http API (I would say it is RESTful, but I'm not 100% sure that it is) - search for a user with some string, and get a specific user by GitHub username. These just pull data out of the database and return it as JSON (not quite the same JSON as users submit, the data has been processed a little bit, for example, parsing the 'notes' field as markdown).
The frontend is the actual rustaceans.org webpage, which is just a small Ember app, and is a pretty simple UI wrapper around the backend web service. There is a front page with some info and a search box, and you can use direct links to users, e.g., http://www.rustaceans.org/nick29581.
All the implementation is pretty straightforward, which I think verifies the design to some extent. The hardest part was learning the new technologies. While using the site is certainly different from a regular setup where you would modify your own details on the site, it seems to be pretty successful. I've had no complaints, and we have a fair number of rustaceans in the db. Importantly, it has needed very little manual intervention - users presumably understand the procedures, and automation is working well.
Please take a look! And if you know any of those technologies, have a look at the source code and let me know where I could have done better (also, patches and issues are very welcome). And of course, if you are part of the Rust community, please add yourself!
Some of the technologies I was interested in were the modern, client-side, JS frameworks (Ember, Angular, React, etc.), node.js, and RESTful APIs. I ended up using Ember, node.js, and the GitHub API. I had fun learning about these technologies and learnt a lot, although I don't think I did more than scratch the surface, especially with Ember, which is HUGE.
What made the project a little bit more interesting is that I have absolutely no interest in getting involved with user credentials - there is simply too much that can go wrong, security-wise, and no one wants to remember another username and password. To deal with this, I observed that pretty much everyone in the Rust community already has a GitHub account, so why not let GitHub do the hard work with security and logins, etc. It is possible to use GitHub authentication on your own website, but I thought it would be fun to use pull requests to maintain user data in the phone book, rather than having to develop a UI for adding and editing user data.
The design of rustaceans.org follows from the idea of making it pull request based: there is a repository, hosted on GitHub, which contains a JSON file for each user. Users can add or update their information by sending a pull request. When a PR is submitted, a GitHub hook sends a request to the rustaceans.org backend (the node.js bit). The backend does a little sanity checking (most importantly that the user has only updated their own data), then merges the PR, then updates the backing database with the user's new data (the db could be considered a cache for the user data repository, it can be completely rebuilt from the repo when necessary).
The backend exposes a web service to access the db. This provides two functions as an http API (I would say it is RESTful, but I'm not 100% sure that it is) - search for a user with some string, and get a specific user by GitHub username. These just pull data out of the database and return it as JSON (not quite the same JSON as users submit, the data has been processed a little bit, for example, parsing the 'notes' field as markdown).
The frontend is the actual rustaceans.org webpage, which is just a small Ember app, and is a pretty simple UI wrapper around the backend web service. There is a front page with some info and a search box, and you can use direct links to users, e.g., http://www.rustaceans.org/nick29581.
All the implementation is pretty straightforward, which I think verifies the design to some extent. The hardest part was learning the new technologies. While using the site is certainly different from a regular setup where you would modify your own details on the site, it seems to be pretty successful. I've had no complaints, and we have a fair number of rustaceans in the db. Importantly, it has needed very little manual intervention - users presumably understand the procedures, and automation is working well.
Please take a look! And if you know any of those technologies, have a look at the source code and let me know where I could have done better (also, patches and issues are very welcome). And of course, if you are part of the Rust community, please add yourself!
3 comments:
I will definitely use this tool. Thanks for sharing the post.
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What a fantabulous post this has been. Never seen this kind of useful post. I am grateful to you and expect more number of posts like these. Thank you very much.
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