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Team RamrodCS 362
Project Report
a. An informal introduction to your system
 The world is constantly moving towards electronic communication. E-mail hasreplaced hand-written letters; online photo galleries have replaced photo albums; electroniccontent management systems have replaced paper oriented ones. One of these systemsimplemented across many universities is Blackbird’s infamous WebCT. The system hasalways given students, teachers, and administrators of Iowa State problems, but with theupdate to Gold this year, these problems can no longer go unanswered.WebCT, in theory, is a good system. One website where every student can go tofind information about every class they are enrolled in. However, like communism, noteverything that looks good in theory works out in practice. The biggest problem with thissystem lies in the lack of use by teachers. Since teachers chose to avoid the complexitiesand ineptitudes of the current system and instead create their own class website. The problem with this is the students must go to several different websites to find homework assignments for the various classes. This problem is the result of many of the other  problems in the system.These problems include the lack of focus, lack of intuition, and lack of reliability.The homepage is cluttered with various links to classes, and each class link goes to a pageof more icons and more links, most of which are never used, most of which just take upspace. Each link has pictures which do not fully explain what the link does. If a studentwas looking for particular information about a class or assignment, they would have tonavigate the maze-like links to find it. These scenarios hinge on the assumption that thestudent can even log into the system, which is not always the case.
 
Our group set out to create a system much like webCT, without these loomingflaws. We wanted it to be fairly simplistic, extremely intuitive, and very reliable. Weintended it on being nearly as extensive as Web CT, as our first design makes apparent.This eventually proved more difficult than we originally figured.
Description of your learning's when you started implementingyour first design.Initially our design consisted of a large jambalaya of classes,which we created for the purposes of having a thorough design.However, upon the initiation of our implementation, wediscovered that our design began to look more like a design anti-pattern constituently known as “the blob.” Most of our classescontained many interdependencies among classes of othersubsystems, e.g. the user class and the display class. We alsodecided that we should create a type of interface to the databasein order to ease the facilitation of the MySQL queries. At this pointwe met in Pearson hall in a classroom on the second floor with aridiculously large whiteboard in order to hash out our design. Fourhours and several fistfights later we emerged with a new designand a new outlook on the project. We decided to scrap the idea of a User super class and its resulting subclasses, as they were not
 
really necessary for implementation of a web-based PHP system.We were still confused on how we would actually implement thedatabase features and create our class listings and grade bookfeatures. Upon meeting with our fearless professor and discussingour design parameters and thoughts, he suggested implementinga template system to display the various pages of our system.He also suggested using an abstract factory pattern to create ourclass lists and grade books in order to reduce the namedependence on the display class.In retrospect, our flaws from the first design were the result of multiple issues. First, the majority of our group had never usedPHP prior to this semester. The learning curve wasn’t too steep,however our lack of knowledge of PHP aided in the lack of designrationale. Another issue that hindered our design was theamount of features that we decided to implement. Initially we haddecided to implement a group feature for students with similarinterests, however, due to time constraints, we decided to cut outthis feature in order to focus more directly on the class/gradingfunctionality. We also decided to cut back on our calendar featurefor lack of a readily available open source program to implementwith our needs and by the deadline. Our design is robust enough
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