Gsoc: Week 5 Update

Past week I had been trying to get the webfont module working properly and had some difficulty setting things up. There was an issue with the app returning different mime-types from localhost and openshift servers. Well it turn’s out that I was setting the mime-type with response.headers[‘content-type’] , now the response object has a built in mimetype method to set the mimetype .I spent an awful lot of time to figure out this reinventing the wheel by manually setting the headers.

Rest of the week I worked on cleaning up the ui. The bootstrap slider used for the slider looks brilliant but the controls were broken, seems like the author is not very active and found the component to be a bit buggy and needed a few hacks to get it working. I found a fork of the project with some of the bugs fixed. I am considering migrating to this version of the plugin.

I also spend some time getting familiar with the testing using unittest module as I have to add tests to the packages. I am not very familiar with all the functions of the ported packages so I will focus on creating very simple tests and later on expand the test coverage with the help of people more familiar with the respective languages and functions of all the modules.

I had a discussion with my mentors on how this module should be added to silpa as this module does a very specialized operation, that is serving fonts using silpa-flask. Since it is not reusable, there’s no point in keeping it as a standalone python package. Another option was to add the module to silpa-flask repository itself. Again this defeats the purpose of separation of silpa modules in silpa-flask. Copyninja suggested that this can be made into a generic flask extension which can be used in any flask application to add webfont support. So I spent some reading stuff on flask extensions.

The extension will have to keep some high level of code quality to be accepted as an official approved extension. I believe this will be a very useful extension and can come in handy in a variety of situations. So I made an initial evaluation for this and it looks like I will have to write the extension from scratch however the template developed can be reused. I have started working on the flask extension and hopefully I can finish it this week itself.