GTG SoC week 3 =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=94?= Client/Server Separation



Hi all,

  My third weekly report is at http://paul.kishimoto.name/299. Click,
read, and COMPLETELY IGNORE the plaintext version below :)

=====
The third week of my Summer of Code project (separating client and
server parts of Getting Things GNOME!) was a busy one.

In some long but well-reasoned discussion on the gtg-contributors
mailing list, we reached consensus that the GTG data model will add task
duration, and drop an older kind of task ID in favour of UUIDs. The
duration field will let users estimate how long it will take them to
complete a task or set of tasks. As for UUIDs, the benefit ("universally
unique") is in the name!

One other proposal—adding a priority field—is still under debate.

Also, the first part of an aforementioned code reorganization went in.
(Of about seven bzr branches I've had merged with lp:gtg, the biggest
are 1909, 624 and 225 lines, a trend which might continue...but still no
match for this!)

This week and next, my biggest task is deciding which DBus interfaces
should be exposed by the server part of GTG, and what each one should
look like. It turns out that when your application is a delicious
grilled cheese sandwich of usefulness, the decision to pull it apart
means you need to deal with a glue-like mass of sticky, melted cheese.

...maybe that food-based metaphor will only work for fellow Canadians.
What I mean is that a line needs to be drawn across the codebase
demarcating what is "server" and what is "client", and in any
moderately-complex application that line ends up crossing many, many
function calls. The sheer number of these, a non-issue for a monolithic
app, becomes problematic because each will need to be spec'd and later
maintained to spec.

In this case, the way out was to grep up a list of calls from the GTG UI
to GTG core. Examination of this list suggested several ways to
streamline the flow of data, which become work items that give me lots
of coding to do. Onward!
=====

Cheers,
-- 
Paul Kishimoto
MASc candidate (2010), Flight Systems & Control Group
University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS)

http://paul.kishimoto.name — +19053029315

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