By Amir Sezavar Keshavarz
For the first phase of our project development, we excluded the connectivity of our SNS to other SNS. However based on our project vision, this is defined in our plan.
- By use of Facebook API, we would like to bridge our SNS to Facebook allowing students to find their Facebook friends in SOTON Student Connect system. Also, we would like SOTON Student Connect users to be able to post their activities in our system in Facebook system.
- We would like to connect our system to Twitter allowing users to interact more with their friends.
- We also want to connect our system to some other RSS and news server in order to import relevant news for users.
If we had enough permission from the University of Southampton, we could connect our system to resources of university such as iSolution or SUSSED. In this Mashup, we could also import notes of all modules to academic section of our website providing an area for user to put their own personal notes on course materials and allowing other students to see those notes and interact more. At first, this was our vision. However we noticed that this is not possible.
First of all, we considered MVC architecture in our system. View layer is separated from logic layer and we have a complete separate POJO classes to model the domain. Furthermore we have a database controller in order to connect to the database.
For our database, we decided to choose MySQL Server as it is both easy and powerful database server. It integrates well with Java, our programming language, and performs very well on web-based systems.
We choose Java for our programming language. The reason of choice is that we have portability defined in our non-functional requirements so we did not want our system to be depended to an operating system. Java has a lot of resources and as the team members were familiar with Java, we did not have any problem in this aspect.
For our view layer, we have chosen HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Our UI is easy and strait-forward as we thought a good SNS should indeed have a simple and quick UI. We developed three prototypes and we asked our friends to comment on them. We chose one of them based on feedbacks and designed one of them. After implementation was done, we applied the UI design to our system.