The point of this class is for students to have the experience of working as a development team, as opposed to work on a single program on their own (as is typical of computer science classes). Given the wide variety of backgrounds in the class, finding people to get to do SOMETHING won’t be hard.

Our first project (first seven weeks) for this class will be working on an auction platform for a church’s live ‘silent’ auction. Our second project (second seven weeks) will be working with a local high school to create a social media platform that allows their students to keep their classwork and information in a portfolio. Both projects will have real-world impact, and we will deliver a complete product for each of them, however different. The first project will be referred to as the ‘auction’, and the second one as ‘quantum leap’. This discussion is for the auction project.

For the effect of this project, there is already an existing auction platform, but it doesn’t completely meet our needs; we do need the database and the information there, though, and clients go through there out of convenience. So we will build an external platform that will communicate with the original one to pull/push data. As such, out platform will be both server and client, as it will be an intermediary between the users and the real servers.

After discussing the needs of the project, we set up six categories relevant to the project :

  • User Interface – how do users interact with the website?
  • Data  – what information do we need?
  • Data Fetch – how will we get this information?
  • Server and Hosting – where and how will our platform live?
  • Winner Algorithm – how do we calculate the winner of the auction?
  • Winner Reporting – how do we let people know (in real time) that they won?

I work on the ‘Server and Hosting’, and will make following posts about that regard. Given the intersections in each category, everyone will need to work with each category even if they are not in it. In my case, I need the most communication with ‘Data Fetch’ and ‘Winner Algorithm’ to allow the server to communicate properly, have the needed permissions (programming and network-wise), correct ports open, etc.