- I started by making tests for heavy user load. I made it using chrome recordings which you can then download into a JavaScript file. I think I will run a few of those scripts at the same time to simulate concurrency. I plan on actually running the test next week. I also made much needed front end changes. I made it so that the app is responsive to different sized screens, does not have the weird zoom in that it used to have, made sure each song element is the same size, and also added a feature that scrolls through the text if it is overflowing (video included). I also ran into some issues with the user timeout, it was working fine on chrome and I knew safari would have some differences but I did not account for when users leave the page that the javaScript code would stop completely. Fortunately there are events that handle those cases so I added those to the code. The rest of my week was thinking about solutions to the problem of: if users refresh the page it will make them log back in as a new user. My biggest issue was differentiating a refresh and a page close on purpose, there is no 100% reliable way (to my knowledge/research) to do this since the browser treats them very similarly. I then just decided to have users stay logged in all the time. After having a few issues with reconnecting the sockets I finally got it to work, but then after some light testing, the app crashed, I think I was sending too many requests to the server but I will look into it more in the future. It could be a different thing implemented recently. Right now I think I have an acceptable solution. There is no reason for users to refresh the page since the WebSockets make it so the screen refreshes after every single change, but I realize people will do it anyways. When this happens on some browsers (like chrome) it will display a warning that they will have to re-login but on others (like safari) it will not display anything (I will also look into this a little more). If the user then clicks they want to refresh it will log them out and they will have to log back in and I will discard their old user votes as if the user was gone for an extended period of time. While thinking about this issue I also worked with Luke and Thomas to integrate our system together.
Link to frontend: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0182jqTvykRs-CBnIoQ5J29qQ
I think the buttons are slow to load since I’m on a bad network right now. I did not notice this on other networks but I will double check when I get back to campus.
- I am on schedule. I achieved what I wanted to do the past two weeks.
- Next week I plan on helping integrate the lights to our system aswell as testing the app and thinking of that refresh problem more, maybe asking friends for their opinion.
- New tools or knowledge:
There have been a lot of new technologies and knowledge I have learned to do this project. Websockets, everything Raspberry Pi related, Maven projects, Github commands, Testing methods, and probably more I can’t think of right now.
The first thing I always looked for if I was doing something I never did before was documentation / examples of other people doing it (a video is a plus). After struggling with getting websockets to work from java to JavaScript and debugging to no success I found a video of someone using springboot to do it along with their repo. So I was able to learn enough about the process by following along the video and then just messing around with the code by myself to see what happens when I change certain things. I also was lucky enough to find a video for getting a program to run on raspberry pi from the start but then when I tried it myself it did not work. So then I went to online forums like stack overflow and tried a lot of things until my solution worked. It is safe to say that one of the most important things I needed for these new tasks was patience and persistence. Github commands are very easy to lookup, aswell as Maven commands to run certain files and to solve errors. It is also very helpful to talk with teammates when struggling with a problem as they can provide a different view / a solution you were not thinking of. Our team is good at helping each other come to solutions to their problems.