What is left to do? What's next? A lot actually. Which is great! because that means the app has a lot of potential and room to grow into its own "thing". It's also bad cuz, y'know, more work and stuff. *cough* Hopefully this journey has already given some inclination about the amount of work it takes just to create a bare-bones web application.
In terms of improvements I'd like to:
- Rework the 'show more' comment overlay. Right now clicking it will simply show scrollbars to read the entire comment. Instead I'd like it to expand the grid location in both the x and y directions in order to show the entire comment without an internal scrollbar.
- Create a wrap-around/round-robin organization of horizontal comments so that one can seamlessly move between oldest-first comments and newest-first comments without changing the sorting settings of the comments. Currently, HTML scrollbars don't allow negative scrolling so there's a bit of code planning needed to work around that limitation.
- From a back-end perspective I need to either dig into Erlang, the language CouchDB is written in, to implement my proposal for per-document access for individual databases or place an application server in front of my CouchDB node to provide that feature. Without this back-end upgrade my app is useless.
- I need to integrate input validation in both the front and back-ends.
- Explore React Native and it's compatibility with my current technology choices (such as CouchDB and PouchDB)
- Look into web browser compatibility and whether compiling my code with Babel is necessary.
- Security! is definitely critical, particularly for any kind of user data. I would like to fully encrypt each users contents so only they can decrypt what they save.
And that's just the most immediate and pressing issues for an app meant for production. With coding, the more you do the more you realize you need to do. How much of this will I get around to implementing? Time will tell because time is a programmer's most valuable tool. Check back later and hopefully there will be further updates.
wander on.