Databases Final Project

...and that concludes a very busy four day programming marathon. The final project for my Databases class involved creating a database and web interface for a hospital. We were a five person group, and I was responsible for designing the interface for the doctors, nurses and residents. Elaine wrote the interface for Administrators and Directors, Sven and Fadhl were in charge of the MySQL database and Alex used Dreamweaver to make a great looking site.

All in all this was a great learning experience. Fortunately for me, Elaine was quite familiar with PHP/Javascript and sent me over lots of code that I could use as a template for my own work. I was already familiar with Perl and Html, so PHP wasn't especially foreign. I managed to write ~18 interactive pages that allowed doctors to view their patient list, add/modify/delete patients, view their schedules and paystubs, etc.

Unfortunately, our project demo today didn't go as well as planned. Databases was a rather involved four credit class, and taking it in ~5 weeks really didn't allow us to invest as much time into our final project as we would have liked. Due to inadequate testing, our demo was full of errors and bugs. I'm not expecting a very high mark, which is ashame because we put lots of work into it.

At the very least, this project has taught me a great deal about group programming dynamics and the importance of code testing. It's very likely I'll work with the same group of people again in the future.

I was going to write a big post Monday about the Bioshock demo, but I was unfortunately too busy programming. I've now decided to wait and and just write a review of the whole game in the near future.