25/06/2019

Tonight I am handing everything in, whilst I wish I could work on this further I am out of time for now. It is realistic that I will revisit this application in the future to complete its development. This has been a good opportunity for me to develop something that I will iterate on in the future outside of education.

The report is rather short, this allowed me to be concise which is a welcome change to instead having to pad out the report with extra content.

I faced some problems in the process but nothing major that inhibited my progress for a significant amount of time.

In hindsight, I would like to have had more time to take the applications development a little more seriously with some planning and preparation. Due to the lack of planning and lack of familiarity with the language my end product felt a little rushed. It still served the purpose of testing the technology despite this.

25/05/2019

Following my last update, I have chosen to create a mobile application using flutter which will be used to test a concept to prove that I can create an application that Nelson Forests has shown interest in.

For Milestone 3 I have pretty much finished my website, deploying it to the web server proved to be difficult in practice due to the database migration not being a simple task. Upon migration of the database, I needed to rename several references to the new file path. Upon successful database migration, my website was running correctly which was nice.

Creating the video demonstration took me a few takes as I found myself running into roadblocks where I started talking about something I didn't actually implement or I forgot to mention something. In the end, my recording totalled to about 7 minutes which I felt was enough time to show all the features of the website.

15/05/2019

I have begun to chip away at my milestone 3 project, the implementation of WordPress is proving more complicated than anticipated due to the requirement of the 'auction' feature in which vendors can list their own auctions. This aside I have completed the berry calculator which proved to be somewhat simplistic with how I have implemented it, due to the minimal amount of business rules required for this making the calculations work was not an obstacle.

In my other pages which essentially just contain basic web information & some other features like an image slider the main challenge has been making it appear somewhat appealing to the eye, this was made easier using Elementor.

At this point, I have been thinking about my assignment 3 idea and I am thinking about either something using a Golang framework or 'flutter' which is a Dart framework. More to come on this as it develops.

15/06/2019

Since I handed in milestone 3 I have had more time to focus on assessment 3, so far I have created a small application using a tutorial to get my head around flutter. Following this, I began creating my prototype application. I found the way that flutter works to be quite different from the typical programming type I use. Flutter feels somewhat similar to web development to me due to the usage of 'widgets' which allow me to create the application GUI elements in a modular fashion.

I have found that flutter contains many functions similar to the .net library as well as some new ones which are interesting, in developing this application further it would be fun to see the limitations of the framework.

I plan to test the application out in the forest to ensure that the technology works as well as to gather debugging information that will aid in the improvement of the application going further, this is an important step to ensure that what I am creating will be suitable for the environment and purpose that it is intended for.

07/05/2019

I have been off the radar for a while since my last blog due to being in China. Since my last blog, I have continued to tick along slowly with milestone 1&2.

I have finished the bulk of the written work in milestone 1 so I have minimal work to complete there, I will finish milestone 1&2 off this week so that I can move onwards into other responsibilities. I have not found too much trouble with the milestone work considering its similarity with tasks we have done in previous classes taught by Todd. In terms of class today Todd is just making sure that we are keeping our work up essentially.

More to come as I get back into study. :)

2/04/2019

It appears that our classes, for the most part, our classes have turned into project work sessions whilst Todd explains what is required as needed for students. Since my last blog, I have chipped away at milestone two a bit more with the intention of committing some more time to it during this lesson and in the coming days before leaving for China.

What Todd has gone over in class today pertaining to the content of milestone one and two I am for the most part already familiar with, this must mean that I have done an appropriate amount of research into the course materials beforehand.

Throughout the rest of the class, I worked on Milestone One until we had to leave.

1/04/2019

Since the last blog post, I have made headway into milestone 1, my goal is to finish milestone 1 and possibly 2 before I head off to China at the end of the week.

For those that are interested in using WordPress, Todd did an in-class demo of installing WordPress on your PC.

For the rest of the class I spent my time installing gingonic, a web development framework built using Go. The class was rather short and basic in terms of content.

26/03/2019

Update

Since the last class, we have handed in the practice project which we completed smoothly. I got a login system deployed on my website which proved to be just as easy as I thought it would be due how laravel makes the process of building prototypes rather efficient. Our IA report was not perfect due to the limited amount of time we put into it but it served as a suitable warmup for the coming assessment by reminding us of the components required for constructing a well flowing & coherent IA document.

Since handing the practice project in I have not looked at anything WEB7 related due to the current urgency put forward by other subjects at the moment.

Going forward

Before leaving for China I would like to get a good portion of Assessment 2 done to reduce the workload we have while in China. Todd has advised that it would be a good idea for us to begin thinking about Assessment 3, beginning with sending him an email by the end of the week which details the technology we want to use for this assessment.

I currently intend to find a technology that will be related to my project in some form if possible, this will, in turn, aid me in my project next semester.

I am looking forward to the development process of Assessment 2 as well as the new territory I will cover in Assessment 3 by looking at new, unfamiliar technology. At this stage, I am keen on looking at a mobile development framework which may prove helpful to me in the future.

19/03/2019

Today we are being run through the project specs & the course outline to ensure that as a class we are on track yipee, following this week we will be getting stuck into our actual assessment work which will be a welcome change to the current practice work we are doing. I am looking forward to getting stuck into using a framework to build a site.

The brief revolved around a berry growing company in which we have a list of requirement, the tricky one appears to be the berry quality price calculator, which is to price berries on certain metrics. I am currently unsure of how to approach this without using machine learning which would make it too big of a job. I will have to come up with something more simple to fulfil this requirement.

It will be good to get our heads around what's required asap.

After class, the majority of our group headed over to the library to continue our work on the project, after waiting a while for our files to transfer to the server we continued on with alternative work & decided to meet up at Racheals the following night.

18/03/2018

Before class today our group met up in the library to continue progress on our practice project, this mainly pertaining to further getting our heads around meteor & laravel. I was pursuing the implementation of a login system in meteor & the other members were pursuing knowledge in laraval.

Today's focus is around techniques for deploying from local machine to server. We will be using WinSCP to upload our site's code to the server's file structure.

Something to keep in mind in this transition is that we will have to potentially point at a different database dependant on how the migration process turns out pertaining to our database. It is also noted to make sure our scrips are updated to correctly access the data in the new database location.

We spent some time practising the process of uploading websites to our host, this process contained a bit of finesse but there is plenty of online content to aid in this.

Some directory references generally have to be changed in this process, easily done with research pertaining to the platform you are uploading to.

12/03/2019

The importance of command interfaces has been emphasized to us for the modern day professional web developer.

Accessibility in web design refers to the concept of people of different circumstances being able to access & understand a webpage. This can be due to lack of a sense(e.g. sight, hearing) or some form of other outside circumstance.

The marking schedule was gone over this week, it was shown to be rather similar to the web6 marking schedule when it comes to the IA part, important factors being what conclusions did you draw from each step. Explanations of your content are also crucial to being recognized for full marks.

Other key inclusions:

• references
• citations
• conclusion
• intro
• etc

We were introduced to a tool to help the teamwork aspect of our project, this being an intro to Scrum, which was shown to be an efficient way of keeping a project on track in large part due to the burndown chart, which helps visualize the average amount of productivity per day which is measured against the amount of time the project is expected to take. 

This form of agile methodology system appears highly productive at a glance and would be enjoyable to experiment with.

Following the class my group studied in the library within the different work we had been assigned for our team project, I took it upon myself to see if I can throw a page up with meteor, ideally with some form of plugin that we may require. Jake & Racheal were helping each other progress with laravel and finally, Patrick was finishing off our wireframing for the website concept.

Once I get something thrown up in meteor I will review our progress to date to assess if we need to implement anything else to our practice project work.

11/03/2019

Todd began this week by saying we are being given time to catch up on what we should currently be doing; milestone two. Our group has begun this section of the practice project but has not progressed very far into it. It seems a little complicated, we will see how we get along.

We will likely meet tomorrow morning to continue on our out of class work.

Todd is helping us become more familiar with our website hosting platform, this included logging in and editing files via git command line tools & via WinSCP. I think I would prefer using WinSCP as I have grown up using GUI interfaces as opposed to direct cmd commands.

We also got run through how to connect to our MySQL database via the same command line method, also we were shown how to run SQL files from the command line as well. All of these command line methods allow for what is in some cases a more efficient way of editing our website environment.

mor or cat show the contents of a file in the command line, this can be potentially useful.

The next day before the following class we met up in the library to tick along with some more IA documentation. We progressed nicely, getting stuck into the milestone two phase of the practice project, comparing laravel and meteor has revealed that they are somewhat similar with laravel seemingly taking the edge for us.

5/03/2019

This lesson is more of a work based lesson in which Todd (the 'client') will wander around and check on each group's progress to assist them with further progress/direction.

Our group has done a lot of work on the milestone one IA document last night, we knocked out a lot of sections until we felt we had cobbled together a sufficient draft version. We worked together through the User requirements, Site Goals, Site Content, Site structure etc making sure we had ironed out our base ideas and direction in which the site will strive towards in the future.

Individually I have looked into meteor and Laravel for booking type plugins, meteor appeared a bit lacklustre in terms of selection, with most plugins having little or no downloads. Laraval, however, did appear to have some more potential, other students have looked into WordPress which would be an easy way out due to the plethora of plugins WordPress sports on its platform. I would prefer to not go down the WordPress path as I have done WordPress in a previous level 5 course.

Todd provided us with a light-review of an example table of contents for Milestone One, this provided people not aware of the IA process with some insight into the rationale and inner workings of the document sections provided.

As a team, we are continuing today by looking into the capabilities of both laravel and meteor to see which more closely aligns with what our site needs to achieve.

4/03/2019

Today's class topic is comparing frameworks as well as getting an idea of what are frameworks compared to content management systems.

We have a list of tasks to undertake which we should get onto asap due to this practice project being due in a couple weeks. Todd showed us a number of factors to consider when comparing CMS systems to each other, it is important to choose the right CMS for a job and in order to design the users goals.

It is a little unclear if we are comparing just CMS systems or if we are comparing both frameworks to CMS systems at this stage, something to inquire about at the end of class.

The next portion of this lesson pertained to Todd speaking over a slideshow that described the general principles or security in open source web content management systems. Security is something that users of CMS systems can forget about, when you use a system like this you are putting security primarily in the hands of the developers of the system you used. It is important to research into how much a given CMS has invested in security dependant on the type of data your website is handling.

Security vulnerabilities can happen at either the design or the implementation level.

Key vulnerabilities include:

- data manipulation
- accessing confidential data
- phishing
- code execution
- spam

This afternoon half of our team is going to work on the documentation for a while before leaving, ideally we will get this out of the way so we can move onto the development section of this project as we are somewhat in the dark when it comes to using a framework, may be interesting.

26/02/2019

Today's class began with Todd being surprised at the influx of enrolments since the last class haha, we were instructed to get Laravel & Meteor up and running before next week which I assume is for practical tasks next week yay.

Todd is showing us a few videos describing what frameworks are in a general sense before letting us go on our own way and work on our group work, my team met this morning to discern what needed to be done in the coming weeks so we are relatively on top of it at this stage.

It is recommended that we use virtual box in order to emulate a Linux OS to install meteor, I am considering just using a spare hard drive partition to run Linux although it would be inefficient when swapping between operating systems so I will likely go with virtual box instead.

Frameworks are basically predeveloped starting points for websites which are designed to speed up development time. It is important to choose the correct framework for the job as customizing an existing framework can take quite an amount of time which inhibits the reason you chose to work with a framework in the first place. Choose the right tool for the job.

25/02/2019

Back at it again with the infamous Todd journals :)

First weeks always start off slow so Todd is covering a general overview of the assessments we will be doing and other general information related to the course.

Similar to a previous class of Todd's we are commencing immediately with a practice project (in groups) in order to familiarize ourselves with the content we will need to produce.

Into groups we formed, I set up a shared GIT repository for our group and the others handled the document we were to email to Todd. We have also been tasked with creating a document that tracks our meeting minutes and outcomes of said meetings. I doubt our group will need such a thing but it is likely best to follow along with it regardless due to the inherent benefit of practising this type of process.

Todd talked us through the course outline week by week, giving a nice little general overview of the work ahead, looks like a lot is to be learned. Looks fun.

We are to create a website to a fictional client brief, this is to be done using one of two frameworks which we are to choose from.