observatory-proposal-f19.md

Observatory-new Proprosal

Mattermost Channel: #observatory

Observatory is the code-name of the RCOS website. The current version is hosted on https://rcos.io. That version of Observatory is years old and aside from being very outdated is entirely unmaintained and difficult to make any alterations to. An attempt was made to rewrite in Vue.js however that project appears to be dead in the water, despite being about 3/4 complete.

So the need for a new Observatory seems apparent. One that is smaller and more maintainable than previous attempts.

This is now our second semester as a full RCOS project, with last semester exposing a lot of bugs that we had to address and overall improving the codebase.

Project Manager: Steven vanZyl [email protected]

Design Ideals

• "Boring software" but not too boring.
• No frontend framework, minimal JavaScript.
• Simple code with thorough documentation.
• Emphasis on long-term maintainability and ease of development.

Technologies

• Rust fast, memory safe programming language.
• SQLite the simplest database in the world.
• Rocket easy-to-use webserver library.
• Diesel featureful database ORM.
• Bootstrap massively popular CSS framework.
• Full Calendar pretty and usable calendar library.

Milestones

1. Beta Testing (Beginning of Semester)

   • Get a public beta out so that people can test it, and use it for our small group.
   • Fix any bugs that come up with use.
   • Improve the aesthetics of the site.
   • Ensure that we can handle excessive load.
   • Complete migration scripts from old Observatory.

2. Release Candidate (End of Semester)

   • Add additional features that were requested during the beta.
     • Such as status updates or grading features
   • Consider more advanced integrations (OAuth/CAS).
   • Postgres database support.