Switch to club database

[mirdaki]

Look into creating a database to store events, resources, project info, meeting attendance, and more (please add ideas below)! The idea is that we will have a common database where all projects (bots, website, future things) can access and store data relevant to the club. The website would send REST request (using JavaScript) to get the data and populate it into the page.

Things to consider

• Authentication
  • With access control (.e.g. only allow read access to events table for the website)
• Accessible via different tech
• Open source (of course)
• Familiar tech
• Other?

[mirdaki]

This means issues #23, #11, and #5 are on hold

[mirdaki]

This other club's solution is something we should consider too

[mirdaki]

OK so some Rust information that we might want to take a look at.

Rest API

• Rocket
  • I really like the API here and it has great documentation, though it currently uses Rust nightly (not a big deal, but something to note) and doesn't yet have async calls (though it is faster than some JavaScript solutions)
  • A relevant blog post
• Gotham
  • This has a more verbose API with only a little in the way of documentation, but does seem to have async calls and uses stable Rust.

I'm personally leaning towards Rocket for the ease of development, but I'd like to get other input.

Other Rust things

• Hyper
  • Used in both Rocket and Gotham. It provides support for building web servers and clients that talk to them. Could be cool if we ever want to go lower level.
• Tokio
  • Speaking of lower level, this is a networking library (that I believe Hyper uses/is trying to use).
• Diesel
  • An ORM and query builder for SQL databases. It should be easy to get going using this with any standard database.

[hjarrell]

I think that the database interface should just be a simple REST API. However, I also think that it should work in 2 ways. If the github resources or the google calendar are changed manually it should update the DB and if the website changes the resources or the google calendar they should update.

[mirdaki]

I've created a new project repo for this here. Future discussion will be held there