Put it on my TAB

A simplistic note-taking application framework.

Put it on my TAB is a very simple framework to create and retrieve notes. At the moment there's is an example web delivery method and a file system serializer for storing notes as well as a fake serializer for testing. If desired, the notes can also be encrypted with a password. In fact, when using the web delivery method, passing a password parameter is mandatory for both, storing and retrieving notes, but it can be an empty string, of course.

There are no gem dependencies. Running the app on a Ruby version >= 2.0 should work just fine. Older versions of Ruby probably work as well, but are untested.

Structure

put_it_on_my_tab/
|
+-- note.rb
+-- crypto_helper.rb
|
+--+ bin/
|  + web_server.rb
|
+--+ delivery_methods/
|  +-- web.rb
|
+--+ serializers/
   +-- file_system.rb

Usually, I would not include the delivery method in this gem. Maybe not even the serialization. But since, I'm just starting out, and the pain is not too great, it's fine the way it is for now. But the deeply nested namespaces are definitely an indication of things “wanting” to be separated.

Installation

This is neither necessary for testing purposes, nor, since this whole thing is far from production-ready, recommended for any other purpose. But for the sake of a complete picture, here are some installation instructions:

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'put_it_on_my_tab'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install put_it_on_my_tab

Usage

Setup

Fire up the server by calling PORT=8080 bin/web_server on the command line. You can freely choose a port number that suits you, of course.

If you want to want to use a different serializer set the environment variable SERIALIZER. At this time valid values are files and fake. If the environment variable SERIALIZER is not set, Put it on my TAB defaults to use the file system serializer.

When using file system serialization, the default storage directory is $PWD/notes. If you want to store your files in a different directory, you can set the environment variable FILE_STORE to the directory of your choosing.

Creating and retrieving notes

To create a note, you need to send a POST request to localhost:8080/note You can use curl on the command line. The following should do the trick:

curl -d title='The title' -d body='The body' -d password=S3CR37 localhost:8080/note

On success, the server will return the ID the newly created note can be retrieved with. Let's assume this ID is f9fe53fa-52e5-44ba-bb95-64a9bfd030e5.

You can then retrieve the note with the following command line:

curl --get -d id=f9fe53fa-52e5-44ba-bb95-64a9bfd030e5 -d password=S3CR37 localhost:8080/note

To Do

Error handling:

responding with status code 400 (Bad Request) when omitting mandatory query params
responding with status code 403 (Forbidden) when trying to retrieve a note using the wrong password

Delivery methods, e.g. the following:

command line
web (GUI)

Serializers, e.g. the following:

SQL databases
key-value stores

Separation of concerns:

separate serialization gem
separate delivery method gem or using this gem (and if split off serialization gem) in an existing delivery method, e.g., Sinatra or Rails

Parting words

I've written this in several short sessions over the weekend. I've definitely taken more than three hours to finish, but not much more than five, I think. So don't let the file creation times and timestamps on the commits confuse you. Thanks.

geek4good / put-it-on-my-tab