If you think that the RunnerUpWeb project was forgotten or stopped you could not be more wrong. I have been busy the previous weeks trying to integrate the backend as a regular account in the android application. As a result now there are two pull requests waiting in the github repository:
Obviously the second point is the important one. Integrating the account into the phone counterpart is the main step to make this project start up (anyone would be able to configure easily his RunnerUpWeb account in the phone). Once this point was overcome I can continue developing the backend application in order to release a first (more or less) stable version.
Adding the account was much more difficult than expected because normal backends in runnerup have a fixed URL to connect to (Digifit, endomondo, sports-tracker and so on always connect to the same hostname for storing the activities). Nevertheless RunnerUpWeb is a FOSS application you can install wherever you like (your home PC, your hosting web server,...), so the URL the app should connect to is variable and not fixed like in all the other accounts. For the moment I have implemented an easy workaround. Until now each account can store an authentication configuration (username and password), with my request there is another type of authentication that adds the URL of the service to the previous information (username, password and URL are now saved in the auth config). With that change I could extend the former DigifitSynchronizer class with some minor changes to make it compatible with my application.
A second nasty issue (but this one I think it is caused because my complete ignorance programming in android) was that the image for my account were reassigned to other accounts. Finally I understood that the application was assigning the images in (lexicographic) order and my a16 image was before a2, a3 and so on. I renamed my logo to b01_runnerupweb.png and I think everything works as expected now. But I suppose that people from runnerup project will recommend me something better for this problem.
I present a little video using the android studio to configure and connect a virtual device to my development environment. First the modified application is deployed to the phone. Then I show that the new account is there ready to be configured. A new user is created in the backend server. The account is created against the demo server and some activities are uploaded. Finally the user logs in the backend server and the activities are there. Really nice, isn't it?
Some hours after my pull request was posted, Marx2 commented about Runalize. It seems that it is another try to make another free source backend server for sport activities. I simply did not find it when I looked for that type of application. Let's see what happens because Runalize has no account in runnerup neither. My personal opinion is that they should have been trying what I am doing long time ago. That way they have saved me a lot of time and effort. For the moment I will keep pushing to integrate my changes in runnerup. I suppose that Runalize also needs URL configuration for the account. So the change can help both.
Enjoy!
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