Status update, 2011-10-24

[Iain McGinniss]

Welcome to the first weekly status update email. Our hope is that by issuing these status updates, those who are interested in the belay research project can get an idea of what we are currently working on, and how our plans change over time.

This week:

• Mark, Ulfar and Iain attended the 13th Internet Identity Workshop, where we demonstrated the Belay project to those who were interested and ran a short session on the benefits of the Belay approach to authorization. This pique the interest of a number of attendees, some of whom are now subscribed to this group - welcome! This workshop dominated our time for the week.
• The version of the station running on appspot was found to be unacceptably slow when running on appspot. Mark put some effort in to clean up the user experience during load, though more work is still required to make it completely smooth.
• The Belay research site has been cleaned up and reorganized in response to our recent launch on appspot, and a belay demo being included as part of the example set of the new Dart language.
• Iain worked on solving the "relaunch" problem, where refreshing a window containing a belay enabled instance generally breaks the application. A solution for this will be committed as part of this week's planned work.

In the coming week, we intend to:

• Clean up the code which deals with launching instances of stations and applications. There are a number of code readability and duplication issues here that we hope to resolve, which should make the whole process of launching belay enabled web applications easier to understand.
• More rigorously document the interfaces offered between the various components of the belay world - the web applications, the trusted frame injected into their pages, the shared worker and the station. There are a number of conceptual parts here which are badly named, we intend to review and rename everything such that we can provide a clear, consistently applied lexicon to the whole code base.
• Testing - our goals for this quarter are largely aimed at making belay ready for deployment for real applications. A big part of this will be improving our testing, by fixing existing tests and producing functional tests for our demos, to make it easier to spot regressions as we move forward.
• Code metrics - we need to ensure we conform to the Google style guide for Javascript and Python, and also (where possible) apply automated verification tools to help up identify potential mistakes that are missed by our tests.
• Migrate to the Python 2.7 API for AppEngine.

Iain McGinniss | Intern | iain...@google.com | 412-736-7803