Lab project update 2

First, I didn't convert GET to POST as I said before. Turns out it's pretty difficult to use 3rd party POST request to communicate with a django app: django has banned it for safety issues, particularly CSRF attack. It would take a while if one wants to reenable it. Maybe another time I will sit down and get it over in the future.

Today I find another thing though. So Google Places API supports sorted result, i.e., return a list of places that is sorted based on either 'prominence' or 'distance'. Sorted by distance is just what I need because I need to predict where the user is and of course the geographically nearest place is a good start. However, when you use this feature, it requires you to put in at least one of other three options: keyword, name or types. The first two of course do not fit since I don't know where the user is; the last one makes sense only if we include all types it supports (it has a list). Well, unless there is another to sort by distance, I decide to include all types. This takes me 5 minutes using regular expression. But I do not update the function in the android app, therefore places it stores are still sorted by prominence (by default).

Previously the db in my web app only has fields for time, latitude and longitude, since I am gonna find the nearest place for each pair of coordinates, I decide to modify my db to add three fields: place name, place latitude and place longitude. In this case, it is the best time to learn South. South is a db migration tool for django. Db migration is to let you modify db attributes without wiping all current data. Use db is very simple and it has a great doc support. But one thing though, heroku has three environments, every one needs its own migration, but alway you sync between them. Therefore, you have to be careful that all dbs should be in the same stage as you develop. Otherwise, things could get pretty ugly.

Last thing is I finish the web app with functions to draw the original point, the nearest place obtained from google places, remove points and their places and some nice UI from twitter bootstrap. Twitter bootstrap is such an awesome project that no one would realize its awesomeness until you render your site and play with it. Currently my web app is just look-able, I will dig more from this bootstrap later.