Design

Implementation

The biggest design decision we made for our implementation was to use the Django framework.  We chose to use a framework in general, because it would allow us to make our application much more robust with much less code.  We chose to use a database, because it provides an easy and persistent way to store data.  We specifically chose Django, because it provides an excellent admin interface, which we could use without having to actually write it and which makes it possible to edit the database without being a technical person.  This was important for our project because it makes it so that the administrators at the ski school could actually directly edit the database if need be even though they do not have any coding abilities.  Django also provides authentication methods, which made implementing login very easy.

Additionally, Django models enables us to easily follow an MVC pattern, since the models make it easy to separate the model from the controller.  Furthermore, we choose to keep all of our CSS in a separate file to separate out the view from the controller.  By following MVC, it was much easier for us to make changes to the view as we got feedback from HW2, because many of the changes, namely the cosmetic ones, only required editing the CSS, but did not affect any of the logic.

We also used Django templates.  This allowed us to inherit the heading and navigation bar and also allowed us to use the same views for the admin and instructor interfaces simply by adding in if-statements.  All of these features of templating allowed us to write significantly less code than we otherwise would have had to write, which allowed us to implement more features and reduce the number of bugs that could be introduced.

We used javascript to implement much of the logic.  We chose to draw much of the calendar with javascript, rather than doing it directly in the html.  This makes our application unusable for users without javascript enabled browsers, which could be a usability problem, but since pretty much all modern browsers have javascript enabled, we don’t expect it to actually be a problem.  We chose to implement the calendar in the javascript because doing so made it very easy to keep a copy of the working schedule in memory on the client side without editing the database.  This made it very easy for users to cancel all changes in a session simply by going to another page (we do warn users before they do this), but also limited the ability of the application to recover any unsaved changes if the browser crashed.

The implementation decisions that we made allowed us to use many of the Django features, thus enabling us to focus on the most interesting user interface portions of our application design, while still providing a fully functional application.

Evaluation

User Testing

How it was conducted

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