What I’m Busy with Lately
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
The last couple of weeks were super busy for me. We had a subject called “Information Systems Development” where we’re required to develop a simple membership system for a fictionous business. Firstly, we were required to crap about the company’s background. Then came the planning process: creating DFDs, Entity-Relationship diagrams and so on.
I find the ER-diagrams quite useful, as you’d refer to it when making queries. However, the usefulness of DFD has yet to be seen by me, especially with a project this size. It’s “formal-ness” and the requirement to include every single freaking detail is certainly beyond my understanding. For example, why would you need to draw out a diagram for a reporting module? If your report is really that complicated, a seperate sheet that lists the steps taken to render that report would be more useful in my opinion.
Unfortunately, my course: “Information Systems Engineering” puts too little focus on the basic foundation: programming. It’s very apparent in this project we did this semester. There were hardly any emphasis on the coding approach taken. Sigh, sometimes it makes me think if I chose the right place to further my studies..
On with my project! Haha… me and my friend (it’s a 2 person project) decided to develop a membership system for a cyber cafe, called “Advanced Cyber Cafe”. Hey, any cyber cafe that runs a program like hours would truly be “advanced”, LoL.. The part that makes our project stands out from the rest (we’re all doing membership systems) according to the lecturer, is that we have a “voucher”. Our lecturer asked us to include a mini sales system into it too. So I cooked up this fabulous “Checkout” module:
The staff/cashier would enter the usage duration (peak and/or off-peak), select any redemptions that the member wants to make, and an instant summary is made at the bottom. The difficult part in this is that the entire summary changes whenever the input changes. Thanks to some poor code planning, the codes are at the border of “spaghetti code”. Since it’s not object oriented, there’re just functions, functions, functions in the codes. While coding, I would find different way of organizing these functions, but since I know this project is a do once, forget about it, so I could hardly be bothered reorganizing the codes :p.
Check out the screenshots here at my Flickr page.
Tags: college-assignments, general programming
