The prototype is finally in full swing. I’ve got a fancy login page and a couple of pages that will display only for certain user roles. For instance, a student can’t access the “Class Settings” page. Right now the authentication is extremely basic – a simple call to the database will check if the logged in user is of a certain role. It’s not how the final system will work but it’ll do for a prototype. Now that I’ve actually started coding I’ve started thinking about how to populate the calendar with events from the database. Since we want to make it so that when the user clicks the navigation buttons on the calendar (to change dates) the calendar updates itself with events for that date range, I’ll have to look through FullCalendar’s documentation to see what API calls I can use. Ideally I either need a method that returns the currently displayed date range or need to figure out a way to display only the days of the current month and not any from the past/next month.
Week of April 7th
I finally started working on a prototype website this week. With the sitemap more or less finalized, Fardad gave me the go-ahead to make a prototype. Since I’ve never coded a website using JSP, a lot of the next few weeks will be trial and error while I figure things out. I’ve been using this tutorial to get started. I decided on using NetBeans as my IDE because it has built-in server and database management tools. I didn’t come in Thursday or Friday because I have exams next week. I’ll probably take next week off as well to finish up assignments and projects.
Week of March 31st
We had another integration meeting this Monday to discuss the changes to our system. The two biggest changes are the removal of the coordinator and chair user roles and the addition of whitelists as a method for allowing users to join a meeting or lecture. Before the changes, we had created several user roles in an attempt to distribute the work of creating and managing user accounts. Chairs would create Coordinator accounts, Coordinators would create Professor accounts, and so on. Now we have a much more simplified hierarchy with the Admin accounts having the ability to create every other type of user. The other major change was moving from a password-oriented meeting/lecture access system to a whitelist one. Every meeting/lecture will have a whitelist of usernames that are able to join said meeting/lecture. The calendar view upon logging in will now display all meetings/lectures that the user has been whitelisted for. These changes required the database and sitemap to be changed accordingly. I’ve been working on those and should have them done by Monday.