##Week 4: Weekend Challenge : Databases

This challenge consolidated our experience from the Bookmark Manager task. It involved a basic Twitter clone that allowed users to post messages to a public stream. The end app is hosted here on Heroku.

###Basic Functionality

Users sign up with an email, name, password, and a user-name, and are subsequently able to log-in and log-out. Names and user-names are unique and passwords are secured via BCrypt. Users must be logged-in in order to post, but any person is able to view a chronologically-ordered list of posts. Posts are labelled with both a name and user-name. The DataMapper ORM has been deployed to manage data from a PostgreSQL database. This has been built in accordance with test-driven-development philosophies.

###Refactoring Potential

There is refactoring potential in certain spec tests and controllers could be separated from the central server app file. I have deliberately chosen to keep things as they are for my ease of reference.

###Feedback From Review & Ways To Improve

• Refactoring per above.
• Many tests appear similar. A helper module could be established and included into the spec files as appropriate.
• Mailgun is being called in tests and could be stubbed out
• Tests could be more eloquent. 1 test = 1 expectation
• Controllers could be grouped in their own folder
• Animation in index.erb could be extracted into its own script file and called in
• The controller has a lot of logic in it (per above). Mailgun could be considered for extraction into its own separate class or module.

###Technologies

• DataMapper with a PostgreSQL Database
• Ruby
• BCrypt
• RSpec, Capybara
• Sinatra-Cucumber
• Heroku Hosting
• HTML/CSS
• Orderly Gem