I want to share with you my story of how I created my side project, Lists, a web application for creating custom shopping lists to share with other people. This was a very interesting and challenging project that helped me learn a lot of things and improve my skills as a web developer. I hope that by reading my story, you will get some insights and inspiration for your own projects.
This project was an assignment of the university course "Web Programming". It was one of the first courses in web development that I took and this project was a good challenge by all means. The main idea behind the project was to create a web application with a catalog of already existing products, but also with the possibility to create your own custom products, where anyone could create different lists for different needs, add products to these lists, share the lists with other people and be notified when you were close to a shop that sold a product in one of your lists.
How I planned and designed the project
The technologies that me and my team used to implement this project were already defined by the professor and, as the project was mainly focused on Java, we used it. We designed the project with the MVC pattern, defining all the view part with JSP pages using JSTL. The guidelines of the project given by the professor were not as detailed as one could expect, so we had to really take our time in the design process. We also created an ER diagram and a UseCase diagram that you can find in this folder: Doc Folder
The main features of the project are thoroughly described in this pdf that you can read: Documentation pdf
How I implemented and tested the project
At the time, the main challenges were surely highlighted by the lack of experience that me and my team had, given the fact that this was one of the very first web projects that we all worked on. So, we used NetBeans as IDE to write the code and Tomcat to run the web application. Every feature that we developed passed through some serious test phases in which a lot of problems in both design and technical fields came out. Thinking about it now, I'd say that without knowing it, our team was divided into two internal teams: One dev team (where I was) and a sort of Quality Assurance team. As in all teams, we also had some communication problems which especially when we were close to the deadline created some disagreements. But I have to say we handled it pretty well, sitting around a table and discussing all the problems we were having and deciding which ones were more important, assigning them an urgency level, and solving them first. This approach helped us resolve the majority of the serious problems, leaving unresolved only a few secondary problems.
How I deployed and maintained the project
As I already said, all the features were tested by some components of the team focused on quality assurance. Also, being a university course project, we didn't have the need to deploy and host the project for real. Although we had a problem in this sense. Every member had the master branch on his computer running on NetBeans, however at the beginning, everyone had also his own copy of the database. We wanted to avoid this by having a unique database for everyone. We also didn't want to pay for an online service and in 2017 with small knowledge on the field, we couldn't find a solution. So what I did was starting a server on my Raspberry Pi at home, creating a free DDNS, using the route forwarding on my home router and giving access to the database to all my team members which now had all the same database. This was not optimal and surely not very quick, but I think it is a good example of how with some imagination you can always find a way to create things without paying for expensive services (at least at the beginning).
What I learned from the project
This project put me and my team under a lot of stress, challenge and it gave us a lot of study and work to do. I think that the scarcity of details in the main essay was both an increase in the complexity of the project and an opportunity to work on something by our own. In the end, the result was great and everything worked perfectly. We made the decision to omit some parts and include different ones and this decision, with the right motivations, was rewarded.
I learned a lot of things from this project, especially how to use various technologies, tools, and languages, such as Java, JSP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, NetBeans, Tomcat, MySQL, etc. I also learned how to design, implement and test a complex and challenging web application, such as a custom shopping list website. I also learned how to communicate and collaborate with different people, such as my team members, the professor, the users, etc. I also learned how to solve problems and create value for the users and the clients.
This project helped me grow and improve as a web developer and as a professional in general. It also prepared me for the challenges and opportunities that await me in the future. It also gave me a lot of satisfaction and pride, as I was able to create something useful and valuable for myself and for other people.
