As it turns out, the I've already missed one of the milestones I set in my last post about my forum app rewrite. Instead of beating myself up over it, I'm just going to pat myself on the back for working on it at all, since this is something I've been wanting to do for, uh, more than two years.
So far, there are about 4,700 lines of code, and 42% of that is test code. I know that I don't write particularly good unit tests, because I just can't always burden myself to think about them the way I should. I test too much or too little. Since so much of testing exercises data CRUD, I can say that it does serve me well in that it's easy to add or remove something and no immediately if I break it. Especially in an application like this, so much of it is data access.
So what do I have so far? Membership, Roles and Profile are good to go with custom providers. They're not fully implemented, because there are certain things that, frankly, I don't need and I'm not going to waste time on them just to say that I fully implemented a provider. I'm not even supporting anonymous profiles. I also have fairly extensive security logging in place, which is something I've wanted for a long time. I think it's up to like 14 events that are captured now.
Next up, probably before I bang out the meaty parts of forums, topics and posts, I want to figure out a clever way to encapsulate permissions. I've never done that very well. You know, based on your roles, what you can read, post to, edit, etc.
The 37signals guys would probably freak out that I haven't done any UI yet. :) Granted, I already have a pretty good idea of what my UI should look like. But for all of their crazy "getting real" talk, I can identify with a lot of what they say. Some of it just isn't practical in real, large-scale software development teams, but there's truth to a lot of those beliefs as well. For example, I agree that meetings are toxic, as they say. On the other hand, I think worrying about scalability later is a bad idea, because if you get it really wrong up front, you're looking at a total rewrite later, and who has time for that?
I hope I can continue to have this level of energy and wrap this project by the end of the summer.
No comments yet.