This week was lots and lots of coding. With only a couple hick-ups (now resolved), the SeaIce prototype is online — albeit with a subset of the planned features. Users may now log on with their Google accounts and browse or search by term string (no authentication required), add terms to the dictionary, and edit ones they own.
There were a number of challenges related to this weeks’ work which gave me first-time exposure to standard web practices. It was particularly challenging to learn how to handle active logins and authenticate accounts. SeaIce allows users to authenticate with their Google account (Gmail, Google+, etc.) via the Oauth2 protocol. We plan to allow authentication via other services, such as Facebook, Github, and StackOverflow, that also use Oauth2. Of course, our priority is to finish some of the critical crowd-sourcing features. It was also interesting to learn about Heroku, a platform for deploying web-based applications.
Next week I’ll be resolving a list of TODOs as well as implementing term comments. Take a look at our wiki for detailed descriptions of the features we plan to implement. The site is currently lacking content and there are definite improvements to be made to the interface. We’d appreciate it if you’d take a moment to visit seaice.herokuapp.com and provide some feedback on look and feel of the website. Leave comments here. Thanks for reading!