Devin W.C. Ryan

Why Develop a Tracker Web Application?

Ahh, it is so nice to have completed my Masters and be able to focus on some personal projects I have been pondering.  The first was this website and the second is a tracker application.  I have been using an Excel spreadsheet I store on Google Drive for tracking various things, which does work pretty well for just maintaining one long list of, for instance, the novels I have read and the novels I’d like to read.  When it comes to tracking items with more complex items like rounds of golf played and at which course they were played dealing with the relationships becomes a little more cumbersome though I could also implement this in a spreadsheet; however, I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn more about web applications.

The technologies I will be using to develop my web app are C#.NET, Entity Framework, and MVC for the main framework of the application.  I will also be utilizing CSS to style my application forms and views when necessary.  I am going to attempt utilizing a MySQL back-end, since my web host provides more storage for MySQL databases, which requires additional configuration from utilizing MS SQL when using Microsoft technologies.

Security is an important aspect of any application making it necessary to implement a login system for my web app.  The login form will be the first page a user sees when accessing the site.  The web app will test, when access to other pages are attempted, if a valid user is logged in prior to granting access to any other page and redirect to the login page for unauthorized users.

Once the basic create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functionality is implemented I am going to generate various dashboards for the users to provide statistics and further information at a glance based on database records relevant to the user.  This will include elements like what was the last novel you read (and completion date) and the number of novels you read over a specified time frame.  Related to golfing this would include calculating your overall golf handicap, average score for 9 and 18 whole games, and a further drill down to information per course will also be available.  I’m thinking at least 5 rounds will have to be played for a handicap to be calculated for a given category and averages will always show as only courses you have played will be presented as options.  I may also show the number of different courses you have played and a map of where they are located.  Additional technologies I plan to use in accomplishing these tasks are Google Charts (Google Visualization API) and Google Maps API.

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