Assignment 1 - DPS909

   For this assignment, our task was to use Google's libphonenumber library and create a RESTful api web service which would get the phone numbers from a string that is provided and also from a file that is provided.  The initial task was to determine what language we want to use to achieve the final result.  For me, I went with JavaScript, as I have worked with JavaScript before and would require less effort to achieve the result.  So for this assignment I used Node.js which is a JavaScript run-time environment which allows the execution of JavaScript code on the server-side.

Dependencies used with Node.js

• express
• google-libphonenumber
• multer
• body-parser
• mocha
• chai
• chai-http
• nodemon

    Express is a framework that allows the creation of web applications for Node.js.  This specific framework is the most standard framework for Node.js, which helped in making the decision rather simple.  I also used the google-libphonenumber package which uses the original libphonenumber library and lets us use it on Node.js in a much more convenient and easy manner.  Multer was what allowed the upload of files.  It is a middleware for handling multipart/form-data.  The mocha, chai, chai-http was used for testing purposes as that is one of the most common and easy methods used in the testing environment.  Then I also used nodemon which basically keeps the app running and watches for any changes being made, and as soon as it detects that there was a change it restarts the application eliminating the process of re-entering the commands to quit the app and restart.

    The most challenging part of this assignment was not about the programming language but rather it was about the implementation of the other libraries and packages used in this project.  It wasn't extremely hard but it took a little bit of a research to understand everything.  Since JavaScript is such a commonly used language and also Node.js being used by many others, there was more than enough information available online.  The second part of the assignment was to contribute to someones code.  This was a bit more challenging because before I started I had to understand how his/her code worked, how the values were being stored etc.  This was a very good experience working on someones code and getting it to work, and also adding other features.  So overall I learned how to properly use GitHub and contribute to projects.  I also learned how to work with Node.Js and also had a great time in learning how to do so.  

My project can be found on GitHub.