Week 11

One week less to go, the second phase of the project consisted of making all the data be pulled dynamically from the database, which meant basically getting rid of anything that used to be working statically. Thankfully, my group and I implemented the templates this way since phase one, so in this sense we had relatively less work than other groups. However, there were still many other things we needed to fix or get right in order to get past this phase. One of the less exciting tasks, I think, was the actual researching of the data that would go into the database. Some of my team members wrote a script that pulled all the data we had saved in an excel file, parsed it, and saved it in the database so in that sense, the actual population of the database was very efficient. For the frontend we rearranged some of the objects in order to account for larger chunks of information (now that the database was going to be fully functional). However, most of the work was done in the database and API sections.

I'm linking quite a bit what we are currently discussing in class: Refactoring. Prof. Downing is using the example of a video rent store and has shown us how to improve potential code that checks things like whether a specific client has returned a movie that was rented x amount of days ago. I think the idea of refactoring is very sexy given that it cleans up existing code and makes every thing run more efficiently. This is always a plus in software engineering. In parallel, my project group and I did some refactoring during phase 2 to some of our phase 1 code. For example, one of the changes we made was the associativity between Classes. Before, in phase 1, if we wanted to delete a Game from the database, we would have to disassociate it from all the consoles and studios that it had and delete those if necessary. The new way we did it was so that if we wanted to delete it we could just go ahead and get rid of that piece of data without having to worry about relying objects.