[Phpmyadmin-devel] GSoC Project - AJAX Error Reporting

[Rouslan Placella]

On 04/12/2013 01:38 PM, Abhishek Kandoi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am a first year undergraduate at IIT Roorkee.
> I saw the list of proposed projects for GSoC 2013 and I am really
> interested to work on the project idea of AJAX Error Reporting as I have
> worked on a few projects based on JavaScript AJAX and was really excited
> about it.
> 
> I have been working with JavaScript and jQuery since 2 years and I
> consider myself as having a good working knowledge of it. I am really
> excited about this project and would like to contribute.
> 
> I recently developed a simple yet elegant todo web application using
> AJAX, the source code for which can be found here
> <http://github.com/abhikandoi2000/flowork>.

Hi Abhishek,

have you got a live demo of this application that I could try?

From your email, I'm getting the feeling that you didn't fully
understand where the different components of the system will reside...

The server-side component of this system will not be for the users of
phpMyAdmin or administrators of individual phpMyAdmin installations, it
will, instead, be used by the members of the phpMyAdmin development
team[0] to globally diagnose issues.

> For the Error Reporting part I would like to suggest the following ideas:
> 1). Using JSON for the data-exchange b/w the server and client.
> 2). Encryption of sensitive information for protection from eavesdropping.
> 3). Authentication to confirm that the request is made by a valid user.

1) JSON will be fine.

2) I guess that we don't need encryption as a feature. What we really
need is to remove sensitive information from requests altogether, so
that there will be nothing to hide in the first place. Also, this way we
address the issue of users' concern about privacy.

3) No need for authentication, either. AFAIK, there is no way that we
can check if the request is valid, as phpMyAdmin users are not known to
us. The worst case scenario that I can think of here, is dealing with a
DoS attack.

> I was also thinking of a webpage to visualize the amount of
> errors occurred over a period of time. As in this can include graphs
> helping the user to identify amount of errors occurred over time and
> also a log list of errors in chronological order.

This part of the application is where most of the work will be. So, it
needs to be fully thought through on your part. Charts are a nice idea,
but they must display information that is actually useful :)

> Please comment to let me know if these features would be helpful to the
> phpMyAdmin project.
> 
> It would be helpful if you could provide me with some details about how
> to proceed further for GSoC .

The wiki is pretty comprehensive on the matter. Do you have a more
specific question?

Bye,
Rouslan

[0]: http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/team.php


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