Assignment 2, Upgrading your e-Commerce Web-Site, builds on our earlier Assignment 1. The assignment involved allowing for multiple users to register and log in to the online store. The added components included login and registration pages. It also involved a new challenge of making user data persistent in order for the registration form to be saved and used when verifying login. The assignment also required the site to be more “personalized” for users, e.g., display the user’s name on the invoice. Please click here here for more information on E5.
Though still challenging, I came to better understand server-side programming for form processing. Working more with server-side programming, it is starting to make more sense. I learned about how to address persistent data and transient data, both with different challenges. With different types of data, it’s important to understand how to approach the requirements. As I’ve learned through this assignment, there are many different approaches to designing your online store. With the various approaches to consider, it helps to identify and outline what you want to do first, before coding.
Although it may have helped, I did not work with a partner.
Most of my help came from working with Dr. Port. In addition to specific coding requirements, he helped me to better understand and apply the concepts. I also worked on some issues with a couple of students in class. Thinking through some of the requirements with other students helped, especially with how to approach the quantity selected transient data. The requirement that I needed help with most, which Dr. Port later turned into extra credit, was the edit registration. Without his help, I would not have been able to complete it because it was very tricky with challenges that I had not considered.
For me, this assignment involved a lot more design than Assignment 1, i.e., how to set up the online store to implement the requirements. Since there are different approaches to the design, it was important to figure out first how to set up the pages. It required a lot more thinking up front in Assignment 2, though the coding itself was still a challenge. Another difference was having to figure out how to carry information from one page to another with the introduction of the login and registration pages.
I spent a majority of the time thinking about how to do something; thinking likely accounted for about 50% of my time. I spent about 25% of the time coding and spent the remaining 25% on testing and debugging.
Starting early on the assignment worked well. Had I not started early, I’m not sure that I would’ve finished the assignment by the deadline. There were lots of pieces to this assignment, each having its own issues. I think that building on the previous assignment helped since I didn’t need to start from scratch with Assignment 2. Because there were so many parts to this assignment, it helped to break it down into manageable parts. The edit registration did not work well since I didn’t account for the difficulty earlier. With programming, one minute everything works, then you add new code which seems to work but then other requirements are not working. Debugging to figure out why something is not working is time consuming and frustrating.
I don’t know that there’s anything I would’ve done differently. I believe I handled the assignment well. I worked on the assignment early and that helped. I also reached out for assistance early and did not wait. However, it I were to do it differently, I would have taken more time to plan out my approach and consider how to address the requirement before heading straight into coding.