[GMG-Devel] Plugin for page view counter

[Tiberiu C. Turbureanu]

Hello,

I am new to both Python and MediaGoblin, but I've just setup an instance 
on my organization server and I'm thrilled of what it can do already! I 
also supported the project through a donation last year during the 
campaign, because I believe in the importance of this Free Software 
project to fill a gap in the online video distribution.

I would like to start contributing by writing a plugin that counts the 
number of views, something basic, not the full stats functionality 
Youtube has. But it would be really nice at least for my organization to 
have this simple success metric available.

I read the docs.mg.org and wiki.mg.org related to plugin development and 
I believe I can write this plugin. But I would need a little bit of 
mentoring. I am also available on the IRC channel #mediagoblin (nick: tct).

I am thinking that this plugin could add a new table to the gmg database 
and be 1-1 with the core__mediafiles. I don't like the idea to alter the 
core table for reasons related to upstream development and stability.

This new table would have two columns: the id of the media file and the 
counter, by default set to zero. Then all the plugin would have to do 
everytime a media file page is loaded is to read the counter from the 
table, increment it and store it back in the table.

I know that there can be data races when a media file is played by 
multiple users. I am happy to hear from you if Python has some atomic 
increment for its storage abstraction.

Or if you see another approach for the data race problem, like keeping 
view counters for concurrent accesses in memory and writing it back to 
the data base when the media file is not played anymore. But this would 
not scale for many concurrent users on a service with a large collection 
of media files.

Or maybe you have other ideas. Anyway, I will appreciate any help. Thank 
you in advance!

--
Tiberiu C. Turbureanu
Președinte, Fundația Ceata
Calea Călărași nr. 57, ap. 2, București
Secretariat: +40-761-810-100
Susții libertatea artelor și tehnologiilor?
Înscrie-te ca membru! (http://ceata.org/inscrieri)