Hey folks,

I put even more time into the Javascript build system to start the week. I know it’s starting to seem like I’m a dog with a bone here, but I really want to get this juuuust so, as I believe this will represent a technical investment (read: the opposite of technical debt) for Topia — SDFS isn’t our only Javascript project, after all. That said, I think I’ve finally got it where I want it. The biggest advantage it has now is that it properly creates both a minified and a full version of a given library, both of which include the library’s sub-dependencies. That way, when somebody uses our library and they need to debug, they’ll have a full, non-minified body of code to work with, which massively simplifies things.

The other nice thing about this is that the Unit tests now run against the raw unminified files that make up the library, and the Integration tests run against the integrated minified library file. I started all this work on the build system because I was working on the Chainmail Javascript library, and ran into an unexpected failure during test-driven development…but I couldn’t figure out what, exactly, had gone wrong, because I was testing against a minified file. Once I made the changes, I was able to test against a full version of a file and the issue became more clear. Now it’s solved and Chainmail continues to move along nicely.

Chainmail (introduced back in Dev Blog #1) is the subsystem responsible for managing the backing blockchains. This week, I began working on the implementation of Chainmail for Javascript (the technical difficulties with this task were outlined in Dev Blog #2). I’ve been writing Unit/Integration tests for it, documenting it, and gearing up (read: had several discussions with John) for its actual implementation.

I can’t shake this feeling of nervous excitement —Chainmail is going to be challenging, but I’m confident the team is up to the task. Be sure to check back Friday to see how it’s going.

About the Author:

Cody Sandwith is a University of Washington graduate, and has been working for Topia Technology since 2011 on Secrata, a highly-encrypted File Sync and Share Platform.