Today is a momentous day in the Diaspora API development saga.  Today we have completed primary development of the API, the unit tests, and the external test harness.  There are still two code reviews between that and the real code review for integration into the main development branch, but all of the major work is complete.  What does that mean exactly?

Boy are we really coming down the home stretch now!  All of the scopes are implemented in every API endpoint now with their corresponding tests to confirm that the permissions are working correctly.  The most difficult of those, I thought, was the Streams, again.  After beating my head against a rock a lot yesterday I put the whole project down for the day and then picked it up today.  After warming up on the other endpoints I started working my way through getting Streams working such that it could filter private data.  After a bit of fumbling I finally got a relatively simple solution to the problem and got all the tests passing correctly.

It’s been almost a week since there’s been an update on the API.  I’ve been busy with other things and travel so it didn’t get as much focus as I would have liked to have given it.  However there has been some progress.  Thanks to Frank ’s help we’ve been able to get all of the side branches merged into the core API branch so that we are now coming down the home stretch on getting it ready for integration.  The first order of business for that is getting the OpenID security stuff squared away.  I’m still working on understanding that better and the more I go back to it and work with it here the better that looks.  There is still the question of the "refresh token" workflow but work has been done on it so if anything it’s a small tweak thing or a documentation thing versus a from scratch development thing.  Even in the event that it was a from scratch thing with the code base I have and the examples I mentioned before it shouldn’t be a huge effort to get that working.  Most of the security work is therefore integrating in the much more fine grained security scopes which Senya has been working to hone.

While I post mostly on Fediverse platforms like Diaspora and Mastodon , and am focusing my development efforts there, the instant messaging accessibility of Facebook Messenger has been illusive. I tried Wickr and it’s okay but not the most user friendly. It’s claim to fame is the messages only go from the participant to the receiver without a server between except for authentication. That makes the flow clunky, to say the least.  Which is why leaving Facebook has been one of my least successful aspects.    I wanted to explore other options and in the last week I pulled the trigger and actually did it.