Wafy's Tools

This past month has been pretty busy for the WhereAreGame app. I posted in a Facebook group and a Discord group to see what would happen. In the Facebook group, there were a number of new users that had issues with the long list of BattleScribe. With the OWA stats got about 24 people that returned to website about 50 unique visitors. The Facebook group is a local gaming group that I am apart of and got some feedback from them that has been helpful. I made a few adjustment based on the feedback. So now I think I have a least a few regular users, that can push me to do more with it.

Have been working on WhereAreGames a bit more. I started working on an upgrade on the army list widget. Trying to get it to display more information in a couple different way. Should make it more useful hopefully.

Was able to get Web Pack issues figured out. So that the fonts loaded properly. Looks like with the new version, some of the plugins were brought in-house. I was able to get both apps updated so everyone is on the latest of everything. I started to play with JavaScript based tracking as, I get a lot of noise in the web server logs. I put it in a couple weeks ago, and I am already seeing noise in that too. I am wondering if it is because I have in in-line with the HTML that they are loading it and executing it.

Things were a bit light this past month. I was able to finish the WhereAreGames scoreboard changes and was able to get that posted. I started working on getting the PHP version updated and also updated the JavaScript tools as well. Ran into a bit of problem with Google's Material Design icons not loading properly. It looks like WebPack is converting them to some strange file for some reason. Still working on it and hope to clean up the score view of the scoreboard as right now is doesn't separate very good between the objectives.

Slipped again, I need to be a bit more constant with my updates on this site. However I have some good news. I was able to finally get the Dynaballot code put into production. This seem to be running better and now running on a newer version of PHP. There are some more work that could be done to the application, but I am going to avoid large changes and just maintain until some people make use of it. For the most part the PHP Metrics helped me look at parts that need a bit more improvement. However, it does push a bit far in some places.

A bit further on the DynaBallot rebuild. Was able to get the build to complete successfully, but still need to test the front end interface. Someday I should look at automating the tests for the front end. I have plenty of unit tests, but definitely could use some integration test. I just started some of the front end testing today, and already found an issue that unit tests would not find. Unfortunately, running integration tests is a bit difficult without something like Docker. Now that I am running Docker, it might be something to look into again.

Did not get as much done coding wise as I would have liked this past month. Turns out that making those changes to the libraries, had a drastic impact on the DynaBallot code. Doesn't help that I figured while I was at it I would work on some refactoring on some unrelated code. That pretty much meant that I end up rewriting much of the code. Though I did get more than half the project touched.

Mission complete, was able to update all of my library code to PHP 8.0. Not to soon and 8.1 will be out, but at least I can work on upgrading the Apps to use PHP 8.0. Once that happens it will be easier to update to PHP 8.1. In the process there are few new things I am trying out. Added a couple newish tools to my PHP code checks. The first is PHP Metric, which is a lot like PDepend with more data. It also has a violations page which helps pick out packages that are not living up to standards and gives you some general reasons why.

Didn't get a lot done in the last month. Though a lot of trial and errors trying to get my Docker images to be tested in Jenkins. It turns out that you can't use the Docker Build Step to build and run the Docker container. You can build an image but you can't build and run the container. You need to use a Execute Shell and run it via a CLI command. It is a very unclean way for it to work. However, I got it to work finally and started to convert some of my internal libraries.

Well break is over, time to dig back in. Kind of started a bit early and started converting some of my libraries to use an updated version of PHP. Ran into a bit of an issue, in that I wanted to make more use of Docker. Didn't want to install a new version of PHP on the Jenkins server and use a more contained building. Have to admit that I am still learning with Docker. Though I want to make more use of it for some pieces of my apps.