This week I started working on the backend of the project so that the frontend can communicate with the engine (otherwise we would have to translate the engine code into javascript or set up some kind of hack to run a python script from the React web application). Since the entire project is locally hosted, I chose a simple backend framework with Flask. I ran into quite a few issues with CORs when attempting to make the request from the frontend to the backend, and spent some time adding different headers into my response in an attempt to make it work. After some experimentation, I got the request to work but only when I run the web application from Chrome instead of Edge which is my default browser.
For now, since the engine isn’t fully completed, I’m returning 5 placeholder recommended moves from the backend to the frontend (results displayed above).
My progress is currently on track. By next week, I will have some code for the communication between the Arduino and my web application, but since I can’t really test this out without the board being finished, I will have to help out Israel with the creation of the board to speed up its build process.
As for testing, I will write some pytests to unit test the backend service. For the frontend, I will time the response time for the communication between the frontend and the backend by simply using timestamps (use case requirement is that the response should take less than 2 seconds, engine needs some time to compute moves) and will also include jest tests to make sure that each page renders correctly.