Redemption

What an interesting, productive coding day it has been. My problems all started back around May 20 when Google dropped the standard Zend client login access to their spreadsheet api, and demanded oauth2. I was right in the middle of developing a great app called bdjMap when everything stopped working. I spent two weeks scrambling, trying to fix the access issues, and finally bailed.

I accept responsibility, I should have known they were going to switch to oauth2, but I missed it. An interesting note to make is that one of the core oauth2 designers quit the project, calling it out as crap.

Here’s his post.

There wasn’t a single problem or incident I can point to in order to explain such an extreme move. This is a case of death by a thousand cuts, and as the work was winding down, I’ve found myself reflecting more and more on what we actually accomplished. At the end, I reached the conclusion that OAuth 2.0 is a bad protocol. WS-* bad. It is bad enough that I no longer want to be associated with it. It is the biggest professional disappointment of my career.

Today I threw Zend into the garbage, along with oauth2 and the Google spreadsheet api. I’m transferring all of the data into MySql tables hosted on my site, and rewriting the code that accesses it.

Magically, everything is back up! Routes I had been planning for this summer vacation suddenly are visible again. As I was digging around inside my code I found the point at which I was currently working on, when Google pulled the access plug. Yea!

If you would like to check the project out, click here. You might see some strange trips in there because I’m testing it out. The two main routes so far are:

• June Trip
• West Coast Trip

Damn it’s nice to have my stuff back, tomorrow I fix JimsMap!

It’s also much faster and more responsive without the cumbersome overhead of the Zend library and the latency issues of dealing with the Google cloud. Lesson learned…