John Teeter’s CS467 Capstone Blog

Well we got to the midpoint and are getting the site into some semblance of shape.

We got the whole url structure all identified for all the pages this last week and now its starting to really shape up for the team and I think everyone is finally on the same page on the structure/layout of the site.

We are identifying the URL using a rest methodology where:

www.farmwork.us/farmprofile/”Some unique farm code” gives you all the routes associated with that farm

www.farmwork.us/farmprofile/”Some unique farm code”/jobs/”Some unique job code” gives you all the routes associated with that job on that specific farm.

Getting that whole structure penciled out and “how” we were going to identify and use those keys in our database has been a real A-ha moment for the team.

Our next challenge will be to start to make everything look a little prettier. We are all a team of mostly “backend focused” CS students and none of us seem to really be all that into design or CSS. So. It will be interesting how nice we can end up making the site. I am figuring if no one steps up, we might have to do a little bootstrap mining for “prebuilt forms” and see what we can produce.

Looking forward to a fully functional site!

We are in the thick of it now. We are getting data into databases. The logical flow of how the data will move around the site is starting to gel with everyone on the team (I think).

Now it is the hard work of getting everything to work together. And every page created. And then the even harder part of getting it to all look even close to “good enough.”

Our sponsor is someone who is much more “big picture/conceptual” thinker and hasn’t been able to help us in our technical exploration or really been extremely clear on what or how he would like the site to look like. As a result, we are sort of finding our way and we’re going to deliver a product that works, but may be longer on functionality and shorter on beautiful design or real specific details.

We should have probably demanded a more clear design from him at the start, but I feel like if we had spend that much time trying to get him to sort it all out, we would have been 3-4 weeks into the project with no real progress to show for it. 12 weeks isn’t really enough time unless the sponsor has a clearly prepared plan of what they want to see. I just hope we get to the end and have something that is pretty functional and all works together.

Back to the code!