Content: I hard to beleive but for the last four months I had rarely went out , I do had lots of chances to leave home and go out party with friends but I never liked living my computer alone.

Over the course of last four months I became overly attached to my project and to my workSpace.

So, it looks cool but I plan to make a triple head setup with another LED. I had a pretty nerdy four months , I had lots of cool gadgets to play with eventhough my project Moksaya pretty much consumed me. Meanwhile I got a raspberrypi , Nexus 4 and whole lot of other toys to play with.This has been possible mostly because of Google and GSoC program , giving me an opportunity to do what I love and getting paid enough to meet my expenses and needs.

Lets talk about Project Moksaya:

This year for GSoC , I submitted two proposals one was for GnuMailMan (Under Python Software Foundation) and the second one being for SugarLabs. I really wanted to learn more about RESTful architecture and development so both of my proposal had a focus on implementing RESTful interface.

I got selected for SugarLabs, where my project was to implement a Project sharing website for Sugar Activities.Kids use Sugar , and they build things , they make cool projects so we started with a goal to implement a platform that will allow them to share their projects , interact with other Sugar Users with comments , follow , likes and project forking. Typical basics of Social collaboration and sharing.Also the website needs to integerate with the Sugar Operating System , so that kids can share their projects from within the Sugar Activities.

Now the question was how to implent this platform.I had some experience with Django as I have been using it for about a year now , so Django was my choice handsdown. I had started exploring django tastypie and Django Rest Framework , django based frameworks to develop RESTful interface. It is pretty simple to roll out the RESTful apis with these frameworks specially if you are using Django ORM for data sources.

I had been reading the book RESTful Web Services since April of this year.It was recomened me by the developers of GnuMailMan.However , when I started with my project I intented to develop the complete site in Django and I wanted to complete this by the mid term evaluation.That was the plan according to my proposal.

Eventually , I had some discussions with my Mentors Claudia and Martin I came to a conclusion that implementing RESTful interface and then consuming the RESTful apis with JavaScript web app and webservices module in Sugar would provide a way to integerate the APIs into Sugar as well.

Initially I had spent couple of days or maybe a week or two using Django to build a site , using lots of django apps like Django Userena , pinax-scocial apps etcs.I was finding it rather complex and not very much flexible.

After Martin's suggestion and also discussing the matter with couple of friends , I went for RESTful interface.My only hesitation regarding RESTful interface was that I had next to no experience with JavaScript.I convinced my self , going the RESTful way will surely provide a better learning curve.I will get to learn more about web services , HTTP protocols and it might present an opertunity to learn JavaScript and heroic framework like [AngularJs][].

I liked django-rest-framework and I will surely use it sometime soon for a different project , but since this was my first attempt and I felt tasypie was more better documented than the prior.I started with tastypie, designing my models , creating related resources. I had primarily:

• UserModel
• ProfileModel
• ProjectModel
• LikingModel
• CommentsModel
• FollowModel

This is how the Resources were structured in my JSON response for a typical User profile:

 ::::json
        {
       "about_me": "Oh not it won't happen :0",
       "followers": [
           "aregee"
       ],
       "following": [
           "aregee",
           "kirk",
           "jarvis"
       ],
       "id": 3,
       "language": "en",
       "location": "",
       "mugshot": null,
       "privacy": "registered",
       "projects": [
           {
               "Likes": 1,
               "comment": [
                   {
                       "entry": "undefined",
                       "resource_uri": "/api/v1/comment/1/",
                       "text": ":P",
                       "user": "vrinda"
                   }
               ],
               "desc": "undefined",
               "history": "project undefined  created by aregee forked by vrinda ",
               "id": 4,
               "resource_uri": "/api/v1/projects/4/",
               "screenshot": "/media/projects/wb3_1.png",
               "shared_date": "2013-09-20T19:09:43.084615",
               "src": "/media/projects/feed__1.py",
               "title": "undefined",
               "user": "vrinda"
           }
       ],
       "resource_uri": "/api/v1/profile/3/",
       "user": "vrinda"
   }

It was pretty simple at the end of the day , did required some ammount of thinking but frameworks like tastypie does pretty much simplify lots of things. I will discuss and highlight my development process in seprate parts , for the meanwhile you can check out the live deployment of the web app written with AngularJS here . The backend or the RESTful server is deployed on OpenShift platform.

AREGEE