I’ve been reviewing more JSP this week and continuing discussions on the integration project. We have a hierarchical system in place with multiple levels of user roles (Professor, Coordinate, Chair, etc) so as to split the workload of creating and managing different accounts. Access to meetings and lectures is given to users through a password. We had been discussing alternatively implementing a whitelist for each meeting/lecture that held the usernames of those able to join. Today Chad mentioned that Fardad had presented our current system to Gino and that many changes were requested. I’ll be getting more details on Monday during our meeting.
Week of March 17th
I finished the sitemap earlier this week and now I’m waiting to see if the design is acceptable or not. Fardad and Chad left for a hackfest in Kansas so I’ll probably get a response some time next week. Meanwhile, I’ve started learning JavaServer Pages (JSP), the language of choice for the integration system. I’m looking forward to getting started on some actual coding.
Week of March 10th
This was another busy week for me (at school) so work has been slow. I’m nearly done with the sitemap so it should be ready by Monday. The sitemap now has brief descriptions of what each page does and what major elements it will contain (input fields, buttons, drop-downs, etc). We’ll be able to very loosely trace out the user’s navigation of the system with these new updates.
Hope everyone has an awesome St. Patrick’s day weekend!
Week of March 3rd
Unfortunately I’ve been completely swamped with assignments from my classes, so I wasn’t able to make it in this week. I briefly spoke to Chad who mentioned that Fardad wanted me to redo the sitemap in Visio. That’ll be on my to-do list next week.
P.S. Sorry for my absence, Fardad. I’ll buy donuts for us one of these days.
P.P.S. If anyone’s worked with CUDA on Ubuntu PLEASE drop me a line!
Week of February 24th
This week was more meetings than coding. I learned firsthand what it means to design a relatively complex system from scratch. Every time we discussed features or implementation strategies, something new would arise that hadn’t been considered before. The database has already gone through several iterations but is starting to come together logically. The list of considerations, however, is constantly growing. For instance, we’ve now agreed to have a variety of user types – Student, Professor, Coordinator, Chair – in an attempt to split up the work required to initially set up the database as well as for ongoing maintenance. But this then makes the entire success of the system dependent on the consistent and accurate input of every user (all but Students, actually). Is it reasonable to expect that course coordinators will update the list of professors and the classes they respectively teach at the beginning of every semester? There’s also the issue of how much control any one user type has. A disgruntled employee with elevated system privileges has the ability to completely ruin usage for everyone below him or her. Will this be a valid concern for us? Some of these questions simply cannot be answered by our team alone; Fardad’s already had to call higher-ups to get answers to very specific questions regarding Seneca’s internal structure. We’ve accomplished a lot this week, but we undoubtedly have a lot more ahead of us. I finished the tentative sitemap in DIA as Visio was only set up today. Chad and I concluded that a calendar-based view for displaying meetings and lectures would be ideal for this system. I’ve done a bit of research and found a flexible jQuery calendar plugin we could use. Hopefully we can do some cool things with it!