This week has been a sprint to try to get a launch-able product out for the alpha release. This has been simplified considerably for our project because of the revelation we had about exactly how the block-chain will be utilized in the final product. Basically, I was thinking incorrectly and trying to have the team use it as a full-fledged database. This is strictly impossible because each block is immutable, so once something is written it can no longer be updated, thereby making it an impossibly poor general database. This correction of planning has made the overall application much simpler to figure out and implement for the alpha.
Moving into the alpha release, we are focusing on only the mobile application and the web-server. For the alpha, the only implemented section will be the user section of the application. This basically means that the server only needs to have read setup, because no winery side of the application is ready to write to the database. I have setup some sample data on the firebase side of the web-server for the application to access through the node server API. The front-end application has been redesigned according to the new UI guidelines the team came up with, but has roughly the same functionality that the demo had from last term. This time, however, the application will actually be pulling live data from the web-server instead of just accessing general data pre-implemented within the application itself.
Progress is coming along with the project, but I feel the team, including myself, are falling behind this term. We still need to implement several features to the user side of the application, and then add in the winery side. From there, there is the QR-code generation and block-chain tracking. Hopefully we can get most of this done by the end of the term, but I can tell already that it’s going to be an uphill battle.
