25 Mar 2015

Reflections on my progress and plans

Progress

I think our team is making great progress. Yesterday evening (3/24) we interviewed the leader of our open source project, Jodal. We’d come up with a list of questions to ask before hand, and he answered all of them with great enthusiasm, providing very detailed explanations. He was very friendly and open to our questions, so I’m glad we got the opportunity to talk with him.

It was a great example of what an open source project leader should be like. He’d been with the project for over 5 years, was very welcoming to new contributers and was eager to discuss anything.

We’ll hopefully be finishing our 3rd bug fix soon, and then we can focus on finishing up the poster and starting the final presentation.

Software Development Chapter 7

Databases are an important part of any software dealing with data. Personally I have experience with MySQL, but not PHP. I took a databases course and for our final project I chose to use the Play Framework with Java and MySQL to create an orchestra database. The project can be found here. I’m still in the process of hosting it, but currently when run on localhost there is a fully functional user interface for creating, reading, updating and deleting (all styled with bootstrap).

The SQL syntax is fairly familiar to me, and I enjoy using it. One of the benefits of knowing a SQL database is that other SQL-based databases will utilize similar syntax. The alternative to SQL databases is a NoSQL such as a graph or object database.

The chapter talks about the fundamentals of approaching databases, but doesn’t really discuss anything other than MySQL. I think part of designing a database, is choosing the appropriate one to support your software.

Laura Barber at 1:24PM